Gunshot Road

by Adrian Hyland

  Copyright © 2010 by Adrian Hyland

  Published by

  Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hyland, Adrian.

  Gunshot Road / Adrian Hyland.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-56947-636-9

  eISBN 978-1-56947-890-5

  1. Aboriginal Australians—Fiction. 2. Police—Australia—Northern Territory—Fiction. 3. Geologists—Crimes against—Fiction. 4. Central Australia—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9619.4.H95G86 2010

  823’.92—dc22

  2009044016

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Initiations

  Scorcher

  Waiting for the man

  The man with the ice-cream face

  Hit the road running

  Motors and wheels

  Green Swamp Well

  In and out of the shack

  Wireless and the Paradox

  Meat shed man

  The Rabble

  A woman on the edge

  A fissure in the ziggurat

  Kite hawks

  Fun for all

  A bird on the ground

  Corrugation Road

  Weirder by the year

  Hit for six

  Office politics

  Coontown

  Oh Danny boy

  Three Mile

  ‘It make me nervous’

  Stonehouse Creek

  Bodycombe

  Ground work

  Nor’-nor’-west of nowhere

  Dingo Springs

  Bad dreams

  Homeward bound

  Mister Pig’s Head

  Galena Creek

  Stiff and sore

  Breakfast at Jojo’s

  Devil in the dark

  Running with the wonder dog

  Landslide

  Graveyard

  Bright spark

  B and E

  A bloodshot moon

  All for nothing

  Moving out there still

  Gutter Camp

  Radio waves and green fire

  Cockroach capital

  Mister Suburbia

  Visiting hours

  A hospital pass

  Fire dreams

  Water dreams

  Playing under lights

  Windringers

  Paper wasps

  A moving target

  Roadblock, Territory style

  Green Saturn

  Black hole

  Banging heads and brick walls

  Snowball

  Into the abyss

  A single mind

  Make your mark

  Fire’s own

  ‘Look like you getting there’

  Rowing to Eden

  Acknowledgments

  For Sally

  Author’s note

  Readers familiar with the Northern Territory of Australia will recognise that I’ve taken liberties with many factual matters, notably geography and language. My portrayal of the Indigenous characters is based upon insights gained during my years of working with a number of Central Australian communities; but the people, the language, the dreamings and places described are inventions.

  Initiations

  I CLOSED MY EYES, felt the ragged harmonies flowing through my head.

  Pitch dark, but the dawn couldn’t be far off. Hazel on the ground beside me, singing softly. Painted sisters dancing all around us, dust swirling up from bare feet. Cocky feathers catching firelight. Coloured skirts, circles and curves.

  It was Young Man’s Time in Bluebush. Boys were being made into men. Here in the women’s camp, we were singing them goodbye.

  The men were a couple of hundred yards to the west: a column of ghostly figures weaving in and out of a row of rattling branches. Clapsticks and boomerangs pounded the big bass rolling rhythm of the earth.

  Gypsy Watson, our boss, the kirta, struck up another verse of the fire song: ‘Warlu wiraji, warluku…’

  The rest of us tagged along behind.

  My breasts, cross-hatched with ochre, moved gently as I turned and took a look around.

  You couldn’t help but smile. The town mob: fractured and deracinated they might have been, torn apart by idleness and violence, by Hollywood and booze. But moments like these, when people came together, when they tried to recover the core, they gave you hope.

  It was the songs that did it: the women didn’t so much sing them as pick them up like radio receivers. You could imagine those great song cycles rolling across country, taking their shape from what they encountered: scraps of language, minerals and dreams, a hawk’s flight, a feather’s fall, the flash of a meteorite.

  The resonance of that music is everywhere, even here, on the outskirts of the whitefeller town, out among the rubbish dumps and truck yards. It sings along the wires, it rings off bitumen and steel.

  A disturbance—a slurred, drunken scream—somewhere to my right.

  Maybe I spoke too soon.

  Two women were yelling at each other. One was sitting down, obscured by the crowd. The other was all too visible: Rosie Brambles, looking like she’d just wandered out of the Drunks’ Camp.

  Rambling Rosie, her dress a hectic red, her headscarf smeared with sweat and grease: she was built like a buffalo, with broad shoulders and spindly legs. She was drunk and angry. Nothing unusual in that; Rosie was mostly drunk and often angry, but this wasn’t the place for it.

  Her antagonist was Cindy Mellow—mellow by name, far from it by nature—a manky-haired little spitfire from Curlew Creek. Sounded like their argument was about a bloke. Still nothing unusual. Rambling Rosie’s life was a succession of layabout lovers, black, white and every shade between. Cindy was being held back by her aunties, but they couldn’t hold her mouth: she cut loose with a string of insults, one of which was about a baby.

  Rag to a bull, that. Years ago, one of Rosie’s babies had been found—alive, by chance—abandoned in a rubbish bin.

  Rosie erupted: ‘Ah, you fuckin little bitch!’ She ran to a fire, grabbed a branch of burning lancewood, came back swinging.

  Old ladies scattered, little kids screamed.

  I jumped to my feet.

  ‘Rosie…’

  She held the branch like a baseball bat, oblivious.

  I moved closer, one arm extended.

  ‘Rosie!’ I raised my voice. ‘Settle down…’

  She looked around. Gunpowder glare. No recognition. Then she rushed at me with a savage swing of the brand. I curved back and it swept past my head, sent a shower of sparks and a blast of heat into my face. I smelled my own hair, smoking.

  I’d thought I was ready for her, a part of me was. But another part was mesmerised, staring with dazzled fascination at the river of light the torch left in its wake. In that shimmering arc I saw galaxies and golden fish, splinters and wings, crystal chips. I saw the song we’d just been singing.

  ‘Emily!’ Hazel’s warning scream.

  I rolled out of the way as the fire swept past my head.

  Enough was enough.

  I snatched up a crowbar one of the old ladies had left behind. When Rosie came at me a third time I planted the crowie in the ground. The brand crashed into it with another explosion of sparks as I pivoted on the bar, slammed a thudding double-kick into her chest. She staggered backwards, hit the dirt. Suddenly still. Looked up, confused, winded, heaving.

  Christ, Rosie. Don’t have a heart attack on me. My first day on the job and they’ll have me up on a murder charge.

  Hazel came stomping over.
‘What you doing, Rosie? Running round fighting, putting the wind up these old ladies and little girls!’

  Rosie raised herself onto an elbow, stared at the ground, shamefaced. Finished, the fight knocked out of her. The women began to make their way back to their places. But I glanced at Gypsy Watson, saw that she was troubled.

  I knelt beside her, put a hand on her knee. ‘Don’t worry, Napurulla. It’s over now…’

  She looked out over the dancing ground, her mouth at a downward angle. I followed her gaze. Rosie lurching off into the shadows. One of the teenage girls swaying under a set of headphones, travelling to the beat of a different drum. Cans of Coke, crucifixes and wristwatches, corrugated iron, powdered milk. In the distance the whitefeller lights of Bluebush cast an ugly orange pallor into the sky.

  Gypsy was a Kantulyu woman, grown to adulthood in the desert out west. Hadn’t seen a whitefeller until she was in her twenties. Last year, one of her grandsons hanged himself in the town jail. A couple of months ago her brother Ted Jupurulla, one of the main men round here, died of cancer—a long, horrible death. She’d been in mourning ever since.

  She was watching her world fall apart.

  ‘Over?’ she intoned wearily, shaking her head. ‘Yuwayi,’ she crackled, ‘but what over? They killin us with their machine dreams and poison. Kandiyi karlujana…’

  The song is broken.

  Which song? The one we’d just been singing, or the whole bloody opera? I gave her a hug, stood up, moved to the back of the crowd. The ceremony slowly resumed, other women took up the chant. But something was missing.

  Somewhere among the hovels a rooster crowed. Didn’t necessarily mean the approach of dawn—that bird’s timing had been out of whack since it broke into Reggie Tapungati’s dope stash—but it was a reminder. Time to be on my way. McGillivray had said he wanted me there at first light.

  I threw a scrap of turkey, a lump of roo-tail and an orange into my little saddlebag and headed for the track to town.

  Scorcher

  I’D ONLY GONE A few yards when I became aware of bare feet padding up behind me.

  Hazel, her upper body adorned with ochre, feathers in her hair, a friendly frown.

  ‘Sneakin off, Tempest?’

  ‘Didn’t want to disturb you.’

  She grinned. ‘Disturb us? Heh! Even a tempest’d be peaceful after Rosie. You gotta go so early?’

  ‘Tom told me to be there first thing. Don’t want to give him or his mates the satisfaction of seeing me late for my first day at work. Especially the mates—’

  She studied the distant town, a troubled expression on her face.

  Somewhere out on Barker’s Boulevard a muscle car pitched and screamed: one of the apprentices from the mine. Apprentice idiot, from the sound of him. A drunken voice from the whitefeller houses bayed at the moon. A choir of dogs howled the response.

  ‘You sure you know what you’re doin? This…job?’ Her lips curled round the word like it had the pox.

  ‘Dunno that I ever know what I’m doing, Haze. I’ve said I’ll give it a go.’

  She smiled, sympathetic. She knew my doubts better than I knew them myself; she’d been watching them play themselves out for long enough—since we were both kids on the Moonlight Downs cattle station, a couple of hundred k’s to the north-west. I’d flown the coop early, gone to uni, seen the world. Hazel had never left.

  The little community there had hung on over the years, through the usual stresses endured by these marginal properties on the edge of the desert. It had held together, like some sort of ragged-arse dysfunctional family, thanks in large part to the influence of Hazel’s dad Lincoln Flinders and the efforts of Hazel herself.

  Lincoln was dead now, savagely murdered not long ago. Just around the time I’d returned myself, come back from my restless travels and fruitless travails. Come home, hoping to find something, not knowing what.

  I had a better idea now, though.

  We’d taken the first tentative steps to independence: built a few rough houses, put in a water supply, planted an orchard. Our mate Bindi Watkins had started a cattle project, and was managing, in the main, to keep the staff from eating the capital. There was talk of a school, a store, a clinic.

  The one thing we lacked was paid employment. So when Tom McGillivray, superintendent of the Bluebush Police and an old friend of the Tempest clan, came up with the offer of an Aboriginal Community Police Officer’s position we were happy to accept.

  The only complication was the person he insisted on filling the position.

  ‘Join the cops, Emily!’ Hazel was still shocked.

  ‘Not real cops, Haze. ACPOs can only arrest people. I won’t be shooting anyone.’

  ‘Yeah but workin with them coppers…Old Tom, ’e’s okay—we know im long time. Trust im. But them other kurlupartu…’I’d been wondering myself how McGillivray’s hairy-backed offsiders would react to a black woman in their midst.

  ‘Bugger em,’ I said with a bravado I wished I felt. ‘It’ll be an education.’

  ‘Yuwayi, but who for?’

  ‘It’s only a few weeks, Haze.’

  That was the deal: a month in town, working alongside Bluebush’s finest, then I’d be based at Moonlight. I’d just come back from a short training course in Darwin in time to catch the tail end of the initiation rites.

  The clincher in the deal—and this wasn’t just the cherry on top, it was the whole damn cake and most of the icing—was a big fat four-wheel-drive. Government owned, fuelled and maintained. The community was tonguing at the prospect; the goannas of Moonlight Downs wouldn’t know what hit em.

  We paused at the perimeter of the town camp, looked back at the fire-laced ceremony. A chubby toddler broke free from the women, wobbled off in the direction of the men, his little backside bobbing. He hesitated, lost his nerve and rushed back into the comforting female huddle.

  They all laughed. So did we, the sombre mood evaporating.

  Say what you like about me and my mob, there’s one thing you can’t deny: we’re survivors. You can kick us and kill us and drown us in bible and booze, but you better get used to us because we’re not going away.

  ‘So you’re out bush, first day?’

  ‘Tom got the call last night. Some old whitefeller killed at the Green Swamp Well Roadhouse.’

  ‘What happen?’

  ‘Dunno. Probably bashed to death with a cricket bat—deadly serious about their sport out there.’

  Green Swamp Well’s main claim to fame—apart from the world’s biggest collection of beer coasters and mooning photos, its tough steaks and tougher coffee—was the annual Snowy Truscott Memorial Cricket Match.

  Hazel glanced at the eastern sky. ‘Gonna be a scorcher.’

  She was right: the drop of rain we’d had yesterday would only add to the humidity, and the radio predicted a brutal 45 degrees. Performing any sort of outdoor activity today would be like doing laps in a pressure cooker.

  We were in the middle of the build-up. That time of year temperate Australia thinks of as spring: after the winter dry and not yet properly into the wet, when temperatures, tempers and the odd bullet go through the roof and the rain is always somewhere else. You’d be out of your mind if you didn’t go a little bit crazy.

  ‘Look after yourself,’ said Hazel. She kissed me on the cheek, returned to the dancing ground.

  Waiting for the man

  I THREADED MY WAY down the sand tracks and reached the outskirts of town. I stopped at Jockey Johnson’s house, washed the ochre from my body with his garden hose, feeling a trace of regret: Hazel had painted me herself, and such was the deftness of her touch, even a painted body became a work of art.

  I slipped into the khaki cop shirt they’d given me, folded up the bloke-length sleeves and unrolled the pants. Kept unrolling. I held them up: my predecessor must have been Serena Williams. The belt was going to buckle over my sternum. And wide? I could have stashed a bullock in there.

  I decided to stic
k with the denim dress for now; it was short and cool, practical. Tom would understand. I was only a Clayton’s cop, and since he’d been promoted to superintendent he had enough uniform for both of us.

  I walked through the still-dark streets, gave a couple of dogs the evil eye. Sprung Hooch Miller pissing off his front porch.

  ‘Bit of decorum, please, Hooch!’ I called.

  He paused, midstream, peered into the dark. ‘Who’s ’at?’

  ‘Emily.’

  ‘Tempest?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘That’s orright then,’ he said, getting back to the business in hand.

  I cut across the lawn of the police station, hesitated, then ran my fingers across the bark of the ancient ghost gum there. Felt its smooth white strength. Wondered if that would be enough to get me through the day.

  The Bluebush cop-shop. As a kid I’d been terrified of this place: to me and my mob it was the locus of all fear, the dark tower in a mediaeval legend, the place where little children—and grown men—went in and never came out. Now I was enlisting as one of its foot soldiers.

  I knocked on the door, called out. Nobody answered.

  Beaten the bastards, I thought with some satisfaction. Where was McGillivray’s much-vaunted twenty-four seven community protection? I sat under the tree and waited.

  Generators hummed, crickets called. A truck rattled into the loading bay of the supermarket over the road; a fat bloke in singlet and shorts—a member of the lumpy proletariat—emerged from the cabin, whistling magnificently, began hurling trays about.

  A red F-250 truck drew into the car park. Two men climbed out, leaned against the tray, folded their arms, waited.

  Cops: the body language was eloquent, even if the words were few. Neither of them noticed me.

  One was stocky, double-chinned, wore his belly like a weapon; he had an A-frame mustache and a head like a wild pig. The other was stringy, with red hair, blistered lips and an Adam’s apple I could spot at twenty feet: a long, thin face, like a blacksmith had laid it on an anvil and taken to it with a hammer.

  ‘He’s late,’ grumbled A-frame. A surly timbre, even with his mate.

  I held back.

  From the car, the rhythm of a radio. ‘Mother and Child Reunion’. The riff shivered my soul. I thought, fleetingly, of my own mother, a Wanyi woman from the Gulf country, dead for more than twenty years. My father mourned her still, had never remarried.