Moonlight Downs

by Adrian Hyland

  ‘You should have had a better look.’

  I flashed a cold stare at him, clutched Hazel.

  ‘I will next time.’

  He actually seemed taken aback. ‘You think I’m going to give you a next time? You’ve already caused enough…’ he glanced at the burning wreck and snarled, ‘complications.’ He waved the barrel at us. ‘On your faces!’

  Neither of us moved.

  I stared at him, a bizarre question floating up through the panic in my chest. Not a question to which I expected an answer, but I felt compelled to ask. ‘What the fuck are you, Sweet? What kind of…creature does shit like this?’

  I looked into his eyes, searching for something, anything: a trace of emotion, humanity…reluctance, even, at what he was about to do.

  There was nothing there. The masks he’d so adroitly adopted— Outback Samaritan, Kindly Neighbour, Benevolent Boss—had been shucked off, and there was nothing in their place. Just another mask. His eyes were like blue steel. The shitbag was about to drill us with all the emotion he’d feel if he were drilling a lump of granite.

  He pointed the rifle at me and pulled the trigger. The explosion crashed into my eardrums, the bullet just about brushed my hair.

  ‘Now get down or the next one will be between your eyes.’

  Why didn’t you put that one between my eyes? I wondered as I stretched out on the ground beside Hazel.

  Ah. The Blakie set-up. If he shoots us, they’ll be able to tie our deaths to the gun. He’s got other plans. Presumably bash us to death and dump us at the camp, two more victims of Blakie’s insane rampage. Nobody would go near the camp for years after that: he could have a mine up and running almost before anybody noticed.

  Beside me I could hear Hazel softly sighing.

  No. It was more of a song than a sigh. Where had I heard it before? When she was talking to the diamond dove out at the waterhole. So this must be…What? I wondered. The swan song? Or dove song, more like it.

  She turned to look at me. In her big brown eyes I could see the reflection of the sky. And the reflection of Sweet, steadying himself, raising the rifle butt into a clubbing position.

  Wait for it, I told myself. Wait for the right moment. Fling yourself into him, knock him off balance, gain a few seconds.

  He saw me coming. ‘No you don’t, you little kaffir bitch!’ he spat, and kicked me in the head with a size twelve steel-cap. Bolts of pain, scattered lacerations, a rush of salt between the teeth.

  I glared hazily at him, my head as groggy as a payday at the Black Dog. He planted the boot in my back and pushed. My ribs felt like they were breaking.

  Beside me Hazel was still singing. Tapping on the rocks now as well. Christ, I thought, what do you think this is, Hazel? The black and white bloody minstrel show? This monster’s about to kill us. You’ll have plenty of time for singing in the next world. Maybe you’ll come back as a diamond dove.

  My little show of resistance seemed to have pushed Sweet over the edge. He dropped a knee into my back, pinned me down. Leaned in close. ‘What am I?’ he hissed into my ear. ‘What am I? You spend twenty years hammering underground or frying in a fucking furnace overhead, then ask me that! A find like this, it’s what we dream of! You think I’m going to give it up so this lizard-eating swill can indulge their primitive fantasies?’ His voice shifted up a gear, moved from the sibilant to the demonic, from ice cold to red hot. ‘Or yours?’ He stood up, raised the rifle once again.

  I twisted my neck to glare up at him. ‘Fuck you, Sweet…’

  He paused, smiled. And the smile turned to horror as Hazel flicked the snake into his face.

  It was a king brown. Not a particularly big king brown, as king browns go, but as king browns go, it went.

  Crazy.

  It must have looked like a fucking dragon to Sweet as it flew into his face thrashing, its body whipping, its great mouth working furiously. He staggered backwards, a turbo-charged groan rocketing up from his guts. He lost his footing and tumbled down the slope.

  ‘Where’s the gun?’ yelled Hazel.

  I looked down at Sweet. Shit! Still in his hands. He was a determined bastard.

  I watched him wheel away in a cloud of dust and coils, his face twisted, his eyes rolling wildly.

  But he steadied himself, levelled the rifle, drew a bead on the snake and shot its head off.

  Have you been bitten, you prick? I thought hopefully. How long does venom take to kick in? Are you about to keel over and die? Those cold mineral eyes shifted in our direction.

  As did the rifle.

  ‘Down!’ I yelled as the weapon roared. He missed, but he’d obviously abandoned the Blakie ruse. He came charging up the slope.

  ‘Come on!’ Hazel shouted, and we raced off in the only direction open to us.

  Upwards, into Karlujurru.

  Springs of rushlit water washed to rainbow ford

  AS A refuge it left a lot to be desired—if he got us up against the cliff face it could easily turn into a death trap. But it was all we had, and we hit it like a couple of runaway wallabies, with Sweet barrelling along behind us. We ran down scattered alleyways and slopes of layered slate, we skidded and slipped across gullies and scree, we belted out over a dry creek bed and came to rest in the shelter of a turtle-shaped boulder.

  Hazel gasped for breath and grabbed my hand. ‘What now?’

  ‘Fucked if I know.’ Try to hide until nightfall? It was hours away. He said he’d called the cops, but if you believed that you’d believe in astral travel and the brotherhood of man. Climb the cliffs? He’d pick us off like a couple of sick pigeons. ‘Get a few more minutes’ life if we’re lucky.’ I could hear Sweet on the other side of the boulder. ‘C’mon!’

  We cut loose, then hit the gravel as another bullet buzzed through the shrubbery before us. It had come from a higher angle, that one. I glanced back and saw that he’d climbed to the top of the boulder we’d just abandoned.

  And that he was lining us up for another shot.

  I dived, rolled, knocked Hazel to the ground as the bullet nicked my waist. It should have stung, but in the cacophony of fear and pain that was already rocketing through my body I barely noticed it. We flattened ourselves on the rocks. Long seconds passed, then I risked a glance. Sweet had disappeared. I could hear him making his way round the bottom of the boulder.

  That was to be his strategy from here on, his way of overcoming the meagre assistance afforded us by the rocks of Karlujurru. He’d seek the higher ground. As far as strategies go it wasn’t exactly a startling innovation, but it didn’t need to be. He had the gun.

  We relied upon our ears. To expose our eyes would have been to risk his putting a bullet between them. We’d lie low. Very low. Whenever we heard him scrambling for a vantage point we’d bolt.

  But it couldn’t go on for long. We all knew that. There weren’t enough places to hide. If we hit the open plains we’d be dead in seconds. And he was corralling us: the gorge into which we were gradually retreating was narrowing. Another fifty metres and we’d be up against the wall.

  We came to a fork in the path and paused to consider our options. I glanced up at the terracotta rock face. Should we try to outflank him now, before it was too late? Or hide, bury ourselves in branches and sand, let him overtake us?

  We were crouching there when the inevitable occurred: another shot blew out and Hazel gasped and tumbled over.

  Blood poured from a wound in her hip. I dragged her into a recess, ripped her dress apart, tried to staunch the blood. Tried to staunch the screams.

  I stretched my body out over hers, stroked her temple, whispered into her ear: ‘Easy, Haze, take it easy, darling…’

  I could hear Sweet barging up through the scree; I caught a glimpse of his face through a tangle of lancewood. He’d slowed down. The cool had come back, the race was over. He had us now and he knew it. He looked relaxed, confident, eager, like a salesman set to clinch a deal. Time for the coup de grace. He began whistling. A th
in, tuneless dirge floated over the slopes.

  Jesus, I thought, this is fucking hopeless. I’m fucking hopeless. What have I achieved? For all my battling and brawling and buggering about, for all my poking my nose in and getting everybody off-side, what have I actually managed to do? Jack shit. Get a few people killed—one of them about to be myself—and increase his share of the profits.

  Hazel was lying quieter now, but panting deeply, choking with pain. The blood was building up under my pathetic excuse for a bandage. I tightened it, put a hand upon her shoulder. ‘Hazel, he’s just below us and coming fast. Can you move?’

  ‘I’ll try,’ she gasped. I helped her to her feet. She took a step, grunted and crumbled. It was no good. The bullet had struck bone.

  ‘Emily!’ she rasped, raising herself up onto an elbow. ‘You get out of here, ya silly bitch. I just slow you down.’

  ‘Haven’t got any more snakes up your sleeve?’

  She grinned through a grimace, then eased herself back down, rested her head against a stone, let her gaze drift up into the hills.

  A change came over her. I could almost feel it coming in, like a change in the weather, a shift in the wind. She scooped up a handful of sand, let it slip through her fingers, watched it float away. She breathed deeply, looked strangely at ease and peaceful.

  What are you looking at? I wondered. Or for? The spirits that inhabit this place? Are you getting ready to join them? What were they anyway, the dreamings that passed through these rocks? There was a stack of them, if my memories of Lincoln’s campfire soliloquies served me.

  Mountain Devil. Mudlark. Magpie. Wildfire. Jack used to say it sounded more like a day at the races than a pantheon. But this was an important place, the intersection of god knew how many paths.

  And then, of course, there was the main one, the engine that drove them all. The eponymous Karlujurru. Diamond dove. Strange to think that such a tiny creature could hold a site of such significance. Strange that it could hold Hazel.

  Strange that it could be Hazel.

  I looked at her lying in the blood-stained gravel. My diamond dove: it was her dreaming and her medium, her bush name, her bridge to what there was of the other world. For all of her gifts and bounties—for her rocks and snakes and her China eyes, for her painted maps and hidden galleries—she was first and foremost a diamond dove.

  It was her equanimity that struck me most. Here we were, both apparently about to die, and yet she didn’t seem disturbed. Her mind was on something else. On me, I suspected. I could feel her reaching out, trying to speak to me in a language more subtle than the tongue could manage. Trying to give me something.

  The echo of tumbling rocks drew my attention away. I caught a glimpse of Sweet’s burnt blond hair bobbing through the rocks. Fucking bastard, I thought. Had Hazel and I come so far, only to finish up like this? What are you anyway, Sweet? No doubt now. You’re nothing. Nobody. You’re Dante’s demon encased in ice, a desiccated brute with a wasted heart and blue metal eyes, the last of a line of thugs who’ve been stamping on people like us forever.

  People like us—the Moonlight mob. My mob.

  I’d said it for the first time. A bit late, and a rapidly diminishing bloody mob it was, but I was part of it.

  I heard an explosion. I wasn’t sure where it was coming from, but it made my recent demolition job on the Hino sound like a pastor’s fart. Then I realised it was coming from inside my head. A charge of pure rage, coming full bore with a force that sent me screaming over the rocks like a berserker, then across the top of a stone alleyway and grazing the head of the startled Sweet. He swung the rifle upwards, but I was gone before he got me in its arc.

  I skimmed across the other side of the rocks and rolled, somersaulting and skidding down the far side. I landed on my feet and kept moving, arched forward, forearms powering, skimming from rock to rock, zig-zagging and weaving, too smooth to slip, too quick to get a bead on.

  I was vaguely aware of a thin blue film of racing sky, of the echo and torque of ricocheting lead, of the rocks that rushed beneath my feet. I took a last, desperate leap across a boulder, flew westward and wallward and landed on a bed of sand at the foot of the cliffs.

  My body came to rest but my mind was spinning like a dynamo. Crunch time. Nowhere else to go. I could hear him pounding through the gravel. I looked around me, desperate for options.

  There were none. I was completely penned in, a sheer cliff at my back, unscalable rocks all around me. Sweet would take a minute or two to reach me, but the outcome was no longer in doubt.

  I picked up the only decent rock in sight, settled down to wait.

  The next few seconds were astonishingly clear, engulfed in the silent riot of the senses that appears whenever you sit still in the desert. Ants glided over dirt as gracefully as sailboats. Blue-grey shale and silver siltstone pressed against my back.

  And suddenly, on a pile of stones a few feet above me, there alighted a bird. A small grey bird with stars on its wings and ringed eyes. A diamond dove. The spirit of this place. Unknowable in itself; but if I know anything about beauty, it reached its purest expression in that delicate assemblage of feather, beak and bone.

  She hungry as a hawk, that one. Mebbe dove.

  Blakie had said that about me. Blakie, who saw things other people didn’t see. Was I diamond dove myself?

  The bird gazed at me. I looked back into its eyes, and found myself floating over a translucent pool: I saw speckled fish, yellow sand, springs of rushlit water washed to rainbow ford.

  And strangely, unexpectedly, I saw myself and Hazel at Moonlight Downs. We were walking along by the creek in a kind of waking dream. Around us there flowed a weird, ethereal music. It seemed to be coming from the rocks themselves, eddying over dry watercourses and white claypans, riding on drifts of bushfire wind. Country music, perhaps, in the blackfeller sense of both words. The voice of the Jukurrpa.

  The Jukurrpa. Perhaps it was the same sense of impending doom that sends old ladies scuttling to mass on a Monday morning that had me pondering metaphysics at this juncture.

  I remembered, suddenly, asking Lincoln about it once.

  I was thirteen years old and beginning to examine the world through the microscope of my own smart-arsed rationality. And he’d answered me, even if his answer was better pitched to satisfy a Medieval alchemist than a hormonally charged teenager.

  I remember he’d cautioned me for breaking some rule or other. God knows which one. I was the community’s wild child, forever getting into trouble. Lincoln’s dreaming had a stack of rules—if he’d written them down they’d have been thicker than Wisden’s Cricketers’ Almanack. I think it was the time he caught me cooking fat under starlight. He hadn’t punished me, of course, hadn’t even criticised me. He never saw that as his role. Just mentioned it as something you shouldn’t do. I don’t know why I reacted the way I did. I’d been having a bad day. Maybe I had my rags in, maybe I had a few too many books under the belt, maybe I’d just decided it was time to cut loose from the confines of the hillbilly shit-hole in which I imagined I’d been raised.

  ‘What difference does it make?’ I remember challenging him. ‘What difference does it make? What I cook or where I cook it? What I eat? Where I walk?’

  ‘Is Jukurrpa,’ was his casual reply. ‘Dreamin. That’s it.’

  He was sitting on a toprail at the time, doing a bit of repair-work on his girth straps. The heels of his riding boots rested on the midrail. I was standing in front of him, hands on hips, my hat low and my tolerance lower.

  ‘Is dreaming!’ I yelled. ‘Well that tells me a lot! Is dreaming! And what the hell is dreaming, Lincoln?’

  ‘Dreamin?’ He looked puzzled, as if the question—or the possibility that life could be lived with anything other than the integrity he embodied—had never occurred to him.

  He thought for a while, looked around, then picked up a newly polished buckle from his tackle and held it up to the setting sun. ‘Is just a ’flection,’ h
e said.

  As he moved the buckle a cage of light—a set of interconnecting circles and curves and burnished planes—flew across his shirt and ran up into his eyes. He squinted, grinned, moved it away from his face.

  ‘A reflection?’

  ‘Line o’ light. Like a soul. You look at somethin right way— anythin—buckle, bird, stone…look into it, you can see.’

  That’s it? I remember thinking, livid with youthful stupidity. It’s just a reflection? A line of light? That’s the divine plan, that’s the cosmic truth that underpins our lives? Bullshit!

  I hadn’t understood him then. But I understood him now. Or saw not so much what he meant as the line of light itself, reflected in the dove’s eye. It was like a trajectory, traced in gold.

  A trajectory along which—acting on God-knows-what instinct—I threw the rock.

  It curved slowly and gracefully along the line of light and bounced harmlessly off the cliff face. Dropped into the sand, a few splinters of granite and a puff of dust the only apparent outcome.

  The dove disappeared. A handful of stones, the ones upon which the bird had been resting, tumbled away. Gravel trickled. Things went quiet.

  Jesus, Emily, that was a fucking brilliant idea, I thought. What are you going to do now, bite the cunt? A premonition, or memory—something I’d seen in a painting, the story of a diamond dove and a white devil—was the only answer I could find.

  The rifle barrel came sliding round the corner, followed closely by the devil himself.

  ‘Missed!’ he smiled, lowering the weapon at me. Then he tilted his head back and began to laugh, kept laughing until, suspicious for a reason I didn’t understand—a premonition of his own, perhaps?—he glanced up to where my rock had struck.

  The boulder that had been pressing down on the stones there gave a slight wobble, then toppled forward with a shuddering roar, bringing with it a thunderous little landslide and wiping the smile off his face.

  As far as I could tell.

  Which, given that he had a ton of granite where seconds before he’d had a head, wasn’t all that far. His heels tattooed the earth in a fierce little reflex action, then went still. He hadn’t even had time to scream.