Gunshot Road

by Adrian Hyland

  A moving target

  SHE WAS SMALL, THAT Hilux of mine, and she didn’t have turbocharged diesels, but she could zip along when you wanted her to. I wanted her to now.

  We raced down the moonlit highway, uncertain how long we had or where the pursuit would come from. That there would be a pursuit, I was in no doubt whatsoever. A furious one, given Cockburn’s inevitable state of mind when he found out what I’d done.

  Cockburn’s mind: now there was an enigma for you. I wasn’t sure the bastard even had one. From what I’d seen so far, if you lifted the hat and peeled back the crisp haircut, all you’d find would be a post-it saying Standard Operating Procedures.

  How would he react to a jail break on his watch? He’d be ropeable, of course, but would he think clearly? I pictured him studying the map, weighing up the options. There were four or five roads at the disposal of your Bluebush escapee: the north, the south and an array of bush tracks of varying navigability.

  Then there were the fringe camps, the blackfeller houses in town, the nearby hills and scrub. Plenty of places to lie low. And Cockburn’s manpower was limited, in every sense.

  He was the closest thing to sharp in that particular toolshed, but how sharp was that? Would he anticipate my moves?

  It was with a vague sense of shame that I realised I didn’t know. I’d been so busy making critical assessments of him over the past few weeks that I’d failed to notice whether he was responding in kind.

  Some instinctive caution told me to give him the benefit of the doubt. I turned off the bitumen at Teapot Creek, rattled down the backroads, rejoined the Gunshot just before the roadhouse. Slower that way, with more gates and dirt, but less chance of being intercepted or overhauled.

  Bats and birds dipped into the headlights’ arc. The odd ghostly bullock loomed. An old bull camel, looking surprised but phlegmatic.

  I was anxious to reach the turn-off to Stonehouse; when we were on the track, we’d be half way home. Half way to Danny’s home, anyway, and I was willing to take my chances. Once there? Plenty of places to hide, plenty of people to cover our tracks and smuggle us grub. We could hang out for months if we had to, certainly for long enough to negotiate with the authorities and ensure the boy was given appropriate care.

  Danny curled up in the corner of the cab, not talking, the rhythm of the corrugations, his nervous exhaustion, rocking him into semi-consciousness.

  The Green Swamp Well Roadhouse loomed in the distance, lights everywhere, generator pounding into the still night air; I might have spotted one or two figures moving about as we sailed past, but I wasn’t hanging round to renew acquaintances.

  I noticed Danny had surfaced. He was staring anxiously at the wreckage of Doc’s cabin.

  ‘Meg told me you spoke to Jet.’

  ‘China girl? Yuwayi.’

  ‘She showed you Doc’s sculpture.’

  He swallowed hard. ‘Oh, it’s a dark thing, them stones—trackin the devil. He was clever, that old man—kartiya, but he know the country.’

  ‘He’d studied it all his life, whitefeller way. He was a geologist—an earth doctor.’

  ‘Earth needs a doctor, things the kartiya do to it.’

  Geologists and blackfellers, I reflected. They’ve got a lot in common: they both inhabit an invisible landscape. A lot of things they don’t have in common, though.

  ‘I imagine Doc looked at it a different way from old Windmill.’

  ‘Maybe, but he ended up with the same thing, that’s why they finish im. When the devils attack, all you can do is lie low, or get away: movin target harder to hit.’

  His eyes flickered nervously, then he put his hands to his head. ‘Can you shut the window please, Emily—they talkin too loudly in my ears.’

  ‘Who’s talking in your ears?’

  ‘Windringers,’ he rasped.

  ‘No such thing, Danny.’

  He ignored that. ‘They chase after you, cut you open.’

  ‘No one chasin after us.’

  A glance in the rear-view mirror made a liar of me. Headlights, bobbing about in the distance, a wildcat’s eyes.

  I put the foot down. Our pursuer did the same, but he had more foot to put: the distance between us diminished steadily. A random leadfoot, a home-bound drunk or somebody with more ominous intentions?

  Danny looked over his shoulder, hyperventilating. Clenched his knees, closed his eyes. ‘Oh Jesus!’

  ‘Keep cool.’ I gave him a reassuring squeeze of the shoulder. Waited for the flashing blue light to appear, but it never did.

  We came rushing up to the wrecked truck that marked the Stonehouse turn-off. Now we’d see who was following what: I flipped off the headlights and sailed into the turn. Drove a hundred yards down the track, then slammed on the brakes and cursed.

  Directly ahead of us was a police road block.

  Roadblock, Territory style

  A RATHER CASUAL, TERRITORY-STYLE roadblock, I had to admit—one cop stirring from a bedroll by the fire and the unmistakable figure of Jerker Jenkins shaking himself down and buttoning up in the bushes. A whisky bottle glimmered among the cups and lanterns. I’d caught them unawares. They’d been told we might be on our way, they didn’t know for sure.

  I sat there for a moment, wondering what the hell to do.

  Whoever was on our tail wasn’t worried about soft options like wondering—or indeed, taking his foot off the throttle. He came racing up, roared past in a storm of lights and rattling steel.

  Jerker stood there stunned as the car, a leprous HT Holden, went into a slathering spin and slammed into his own vehicle, careening it onto its side.

  Two figures had rolled out of the Holden just before impact: one leapt to his feet, began flapping about like an emu on an electric fence: ‘Eh! What for you parkin middle of the fuckin road!’ The familiar, stringy figure of Bernie Crankshaft. ‘Somebody gonna get hurt, you bloody idiot! I might call the cops!’

  Did my eyes deceive me, or did he cast a subtle glance in my direction?

  Jerker was glowing in the dark. ‘I don’t believe you jungle bunnies!’ I heard him bellow. ‘We are the fuckin cops! This is an authorised roadblock. Are you blind as well as stupid?’

  Benny, the younger brother, rolled over and clutched his face. ‘I can’t see! I gone blind!’

  The second officer—Jake Trail, from the look of him-picked himself out of the bushes into which he’d dived to avoid the oncoming vehicle, regarded Benny with alarm.

  ‘Blind?’

  ‘I can’t look.’

  He put an arm on Benny’s shoulders. ‘Take it easy, mate.’

  ‘Emily.’ I startled at the voice whispering in my ear: Jet, standing at my window.

  ‘Come. We have seconds.’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  She squeezed herself into the cabin. ‘My car is back along the road.’

  I swung round, high-tailed it out of there.

  She glanced at Danny, saw the state he was in. ‘Boy, you are in good hands. If anybody can set you free…’

  His response was a barely audible whimper.

  I dropped her at her van, then we drove a mile down the road, pulled over for a hasty, torch-lit conference.

  ‘How the hell did you know we were coming, Jet?’

  ‘The police come looking for you. They make the song and dance! My friend, Constable Blad…’

  ‘Who?’

  An impatient gesture. ‘The policeman.’

  ‘Jerker? He’s your friend?’

  ‘When I have a use for him,’ she shrugged. ‘And I use him now. He tells me you take Danny back to the Stonehouse; that you escape him from the jail.’

  ‘Did he say why he was in there?’

  ‘He did not say, nor do I care. I begin to know your people—the world is their jail. The only puzzle is you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Never mind; now is not the time. Whatever he did—whatever you have done—I know that it is not…bad.’

  Not ba
d? About the closest thing to a compliment you were ever likely to get from Jet.

  ‘We try to warn,’ she continued, ‘but you go racing past. That is the Emily Tempest, I say to my Crankshafts—always in hurry. And the police, they are in…wait! The brothers were forced to—how do you say, think upon their toes? Improvise?’

  ‘Hell of an improvisation.’

  She shrugged. ‘Their lives are improvisation.’

  ‘Are there any more road blocks?’

  ‘I do not know, but one, maybe two police drive by in the night. To the west.’

  ‘Shit.’ That meant they were probably blocking off the Gunshot Road as well. We might have bypassed a roadblock or two by taking to the back roads, but Cockburn had sussed me out. He’d guessed we were making a run for Danny’s country.

  He’d covered the track to Stonehouse; what were the odds that he’d done the same for the north track, the route we’d taken in from Dingo Springs? This was a game of chess, with each of us trying to anticipate the other’s moves. Was the radio in the overturned vehicle still working? Would Jerker have rumbled the Crankshafts and called for back-up?

  What in Christ’s name were we going to do now?

  I ran a torch over the map, considered our options.

  The solution leapt out at me: Galena Creek. Jojo’s camp. We could lie low for a day or two, make a run for Stonehouse when the heat was off and the hunt died down. There’d be food there, and water. Maybe a bilby pining for Jojo.

  But even getting to Galena Creek would be difficult; there could be roadblocks anywhere along the way. It wouldn’t take Cockburn long to figure out what had happened back at the turnoff.

  Jet indicated a winged marker north-west of the roadhouse. ‘What is this?’

  ‘Airstrip. Must be for the Green Saturn mine.’

  I glanced at it casually, then took a closer look: the Green Saturn might not be contributing much to the local economy, but maybe it could make a contribution to our escape.

  Out back of the mine was a track that wound down to the south-west, rejoining the road near the old Gunshot Goldfields. It was a roundabout way of getting anywhere, but at the moment it looked like a pretty good way to avoid discovery.

  There were risks. The Green Saturn itself, for one. We’d have to circle it in the dark, pick up the track on the far side. What security the mine had in place—and what they’d think of strangers blundering about their perimeter—I’d no idea.

  Then there was the Gunshot Field. We’d have to drive right through it, and there’d be people about who knew me: the Rabble.

  And then there was my passenger. Since Andulka’s death, the Kantulyu had been rigorous in avoiding the area around Green Saturn. Danny was rattled enough as it was; how would he react to the breaking of a taboo?

  Badly, I suspected. But we didn’t seem to have much choice. The mine was just up the road, and Danny was barely conscious. With a bit of luck, we’d be in and out before he even knew it.

  We made our farewells. Or I made my farewells—Jet just stood on the side of the road in her skinny singlet and big boots, shaking her head and muttering, ‘Aiee…This Emily Tempest.’

  You can talk, I thought. Jet was taking to the relentless chaos of the borderlands—and there were all manner of borders out here: between black and white, the organic and the mechanical, the random and the damned—like a cockroach to a grease trap.

  We left her in a cloud of dust.

  Green Saturn

  WE REACHED THE GREEN Saturn turn-off without further incident. Turned north. Danny sat squirming in his seatbelt, biting his lips and keeping a sharp eye on the rear-view mirror.

  Maybe it was the good road. Maybe anxiety drove my foot a little harder into the throttle. Whatever the reason, the mine appeared much quicker than I expected.

  We’d been driving for barely twenty minutes when a fluorescent smudge loomed in the distance, an array of lights, reflectors and silver metal throwing a ghostly coruscation onto the surrounding hills.

  I pulled over, switched off and stared at the mine.

  Ribbons and filaments of fire radiated into the night. A circuit of floodlights illuminated the mine works: headframe and smelter, engine room, workshops, a row of pre-fab huts. On a flat stretch off to the east, a long corridor of lights. The air strip? Bigger than I’d have expected. There’d be some sort of security. Had they spotted us already?

  I doubted it. I’d been hanging around mines for much of my life. Out here in the middle of nowhere, security would consist of some fat drunk a year or two past retirement who’d be flat out warding off sleep, much less intruders.

  Not that I had any intention of intruding: my aim was to slip around the mine as unobtrusively as possible, push on down to Galena Creek.

  I crept down the road, lights off, motor low. The country this side of the mine was bare and flat, levelled. All the better: less chance of a puncture or of having to make a racket revving out of some ditch. Two or three hundred yards before the guardhouse, I slipped off-road; there’d be a perimeter fence somewhere in there, a maintenance track alongside it.

  All went according to plan. I found the boundary, freshly graded, followed it round. The mine was strangely quiet; given the hype, I’d have expected it to be working twenty-four seven, but apart from the odd electronic ping and the generator hum, all was silence.

  Until we crossed a grid on the western boundary.

  A bank of spotlights exploded in my face and a Humvee came roaring out of nowhere and penned us against the fence before I knew what hit us.

  A door flew open, a figure emerged, a voice boomed out of the lightblast: ‘Step out of the car!’

  I pushed Danny down into the shadows and climbed out, stood against the door. Prepared to bullshit my way out of whatever I’d stumbled into.

  ‘Keep your hands where I can see them.’

  Have to think up some pretty convincing bullshit, from the sound of that. I peered at the car: there were two of them. Big men. Hard. A sudden dryness of the mouth, a quickening of the pulse. One stayed in the cabin, the other advanced, raked me with a heavy Maglite and a set of wary eyes. He was decked out in a crisp uniform, gun on one hip, baton on the other, walkie-talkie on his collar.

  Security appeared to have been upgraded in my absence.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ he barked.

  An unfamiliar surge of panic. I forced myself to think beyond it. Wondered whether the police alert had stretched as far as mine security companies. Maybe not: beneath the strident tone there was suspicion, for sure, the sound of a professional hard-arse. But not the sound of somebody who’d been warned to watch for a black woman and a boy on the run.

  Best to play it safe.

  ‘My name Jenny Temple, sir.’

  ‘What you doing driving round, middle of the night?’

  I put a hand to my mouth, tried to look uncomfortable: not a difficult thing to do. ‘I bin out huntin, got separated from our mob, lost my way.’

  ‘This is a restricted area. You savvy, girl? You not allowed in here! You’re trespassing on private property.’ He leaned in close. ‘I know you people, always sniffin round, lookin for something to steal.’

  ‘Wouldn’ be doin that, sir.’ I lowered my eyes, fidgeted.

  ‘We’d be well within our rights, locking you up. Hand you over to the Bluebush police. What we normally do with trespassers.’

  Fuck, don’t do that. ‘Just tryin to find the road back ’ome, sir.’

  ‘Home?’ He stepped back. ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Dixon Creek, sir.’

  ‘Dixon’s Creek,’ he snorted. ‘You’re miles off track.’

  He lowered the torch. In its reflected light, I caught a calculated narrowing of the eyes, a callous hook on the corner of his mouth. He looked me up and down.

  ‘You on your own out here then?’

  ‘Yuwayi,’ I whispered. No need to role-play the leap of fear in the gut.

  He swept the Hilux with his flashli
ght, making sure I didn’t have a load of stolen gear. The beam was almost on Danny when the walkie-talkie crackled into life: ‘Base to roaming. Everything okay there, Kubal? Over.’

  ‘Trespasser. Over.’

  ‘What have you got? Over.’

  ‘Some little gin sniffing round the boundary. Over.’

  ‘Better bring her in, mate. Brock’s down—wants to be notified of anything unusual. I’ll put a message through to the cops, come pick her up. Over.’

  There was a long, painful silence, broken only by the pounding of my heart. I kept my eyes down, hands clenched. Finally he checked his watch, spoke back to the mic with a dismissive twitch of the lips.

  ‘Bugger it Mark, too much bloody trouble. Let her off with a warning? Over.’

  ‘Your call. Over.’

  ‘Finish me rounds, back in twenty. Over and out.’

  He turned to me.

  ‘You understand I just did you a favour then, girlie?’

  He paused. I could hear his heavy breath; smell it. It wasn’t even that unpleasant. A hint of recently drunk coffee, a twist of spearmint.

  My throat worked and I swallowed bile.

  Another heartbeat. Then he grunted and moved his mouth in the same dismissive tic. Too much bloody trouble.

  ‘Okay shove off—don’t let us catch you running round these parts again.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ I climbed up behind the wheel, drove until we were out of sight then pulled over. Leaned against the tailgate and vomited, long and hard.

  When I straightened I saw Danny staring back at me, aghast. ‘You right there, Em?’

  Good question.

  I was not the same woman I’d been a week ago.

  Would never be.

  I studied the boy, his anxiety a reflection of my own. Get a grip, I told myself. You have responsibilities.

  I ran a hand across my face, tried to still the shaking.

  ‘I’m right, Danny.’ As I made my way back to the driver’s seat I noticed the first burrs of colour nuzzling the horizon. I rummaged through the bag Jojo had left us. Found water bottles, threw one at the boy, took a swig myself.

  ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  I stepped hard on the throttle and we roared up into the foothills of the Ricketswood Ranges.