‘Nothing. Just asking.’
‘You going home tonight?’
‘What’s home,’ she says absently like I’m not really there. She leans her elbow on the window frame and leans her head on her knuckles, one hand still on the steering wheel.
‘I don’t know what to say to you, Sally. I don’t get it.’
‘Don’t say anything.’
I’m lying on my bed wishing I was a termite or a croc or anything but myself. I just wish there was a way that came easy of knowing where I was supposed to be and what I was supposed to do. The souvenirs are sneering at me. To be honest, my room doesn’t look much better with all the stuffed crap. If anything, it makes me seem like a creep. It occurs to me that I don’t own anything other than my boots, a few sets of clothes, my canvas bag and an assortment of crocodile crap. And my Croc Jumping uniform.
I’ve got a small amount of money saved up. Not too much, but enough to make me feel like I’m doing something right. I’ve decided somewhere along my life that money should be saved. Every bit I have is wrapped up in a brown paper inside the fridge. My cold, hard cash.
Most nights I sit outside my room on the plastic chair and watch the live action. People going in and out of the pub. I imagine what it will be like when I’m that old. A group of mates to drink with. My skin drying up with age, my hair falling out, my memory slowly disappearing. It happens.
The list of my fathers is under the magnet again. There’s a line through Teabag and Lovejack. Three names left. Toucan, Stumpy and Boomboom. I roll the names around my tongue. And somehow, McNabm Blue creeps in and shouts in-between. Toucan, BLUE, Stumpy, Boomboom, McNABM BLUE...
Tonight I can’t stand the silence in my room. I don’t want a vegemite sandwich for tea, so I decide to go to the pub.
It’s noisy in the pub. The jukebox is on, The Eagles are playing, ‘Witchy Woman’. The bar’s pretty full and everyone’s talking and shouting and laughing above the music. I like the noise. It drowns out my own thoughts for a while.
The counter meals are listed in yellow chalk on the blackboard behind the bar. Underneath another set of buffalo horns. On the side wall is a glass cabinet with the Humpty Doo merchandise for sale. Hats and magnets. Water bottles and T-shirts.
Most of the meals are a type of burger. Hamburger, baconburger. Barraburger.
‘Hamburger please,’ I call loudly over the counter.
‘Sure thing,’ the woman responds. She’s younger than Bessy. Large, big breasts and red woollen hair.
Suddenly ‘Barraburger’ won’t leave my mind. It’s playing it over and over. I don’t eat fish. Never liked it. And now that I’m an honorary one myself I don’t touch it on principle. Barraburger, Barraburglar, Barrabuggered.
Barramundi fishing is big business up the Top End. Men pay a fortune for a seat on a charter boat to land a big one. The thought of reeling in a twelve-pounder on your line. Of dragging it up onto the boat and holding it before the camera. Eating or stuffing it. A meal or a trophy. Personally I’d rather be eaten than stuffed. My bones burnt in the fire afterwards. No evidence that I existed or was hunted and caught. I couldn’t stand being stuffed and mounted on someone’s wall to look at. The shame of it all. I suddenly feel different for Shelby, the ten-metre croc at the service station with orange boxing gloves.
The redhead brings the burger to my table. It’s too big to get my mouth around, so I attack it in two sections. Biting at the top, then the bottom to keep it even and balanced.
I can hear some guys on the end of my table talking. I glance across. They’re both dark but they look different. They’re not Aboriginal. I glance again. One bloke looks Asian but his skin looks baked by the Territory sun. The bloke opposite him looks something else I can’t name. Maori or something. I find myself giving them names in my head. The Asian one is Stumpy because he’s short. The other bloke is Boomboom. He’s taller, broader. Meaty. They could be the right age.
‘Bloody funny name for a place, if you ask me,’ Boomboom says to Stumpy.
‘What, Humpty Doo?’ his mate replies.
‘Trust you to shack up in a place with a name more like a friggin’ fairy tale.’
The Asian bloke grunts and finishes his beer. He bangs his glass down on the table and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Your shout,’ he says, holding the glass towards Boomboom.
I’m chewing my burger, listening to their conversation.
The big bloke stands and takes the two empty glasses to the bar. Froth creeps slowly down the inside of the glasses, a tortoise race to the bottom. Unlike most of the blokes in this place, Boomboom’s back is hairless. No bristles sticking out of the sides of his blue singlet.
The Asian bloke is almost bald. He runs a hand over his head and sighs. He laughs at nothing. ‘Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,’ he says as his mate returns with more beer.
‘Where’s a place like this get its name anyhow?’ he asks.
Stumpy shrugs. Thinks. Swallows his beer. ‘Some guys had a homestead, I think. So the story goes. Called his place “Umpty Doo”. Like the old saying “Everythin’s just Humpty-Doo”. I heard another guy say it’s a slang saying for everything done wrong or upside down. The last one’s more appropriate for this place, though.’
Boomboom smirks. ‘Umpty’s what they called morse code dashes in the war.’
‘No talk of the war. Any war.’
‘Anyway,’ Stumpy holds up his beer. ‘It’s good to see you after all this time.’
They’re quiet for a while and I’ve finished my burger. I stand up and walk to the bar. I plan to grab a coke and take it back to my room. Hopefully there’ll be something good on TV. I glance back at the two blokes and they’re laughing.
I try to imagine what a bloke called Toucan would look like. Big, oversized torso. Nose like a hook, big bulging eyes. It’s not a comforting image. I think about what it would be like to know who my father is. If Teabag had been my father what would I have felt? What would it change?
Life’s a bloody grisly business. No wonder crocs eat their own young if they don’t grow up and move out of home soon enough. It suddenly occurs to me that I’ve always thought my life would have been better if I had known who my father was. I’ve tried to fill a black hole with the idea of having a father. What if the real thing would have been worse? I’m not a termite; I can’t line my life up against two neat bearings and get on with life.
Some Aboriginals have that sort of compass. They seem to catch the feeling in the wind and know when to move on. Deano’s family used to just take off for weeks at a time when I was a kid. Funny, it was only whites that thought that kind of thing was wrong. Like our teacher. White wants to fix things down, make something permanent. Black has feet in the dirt and can feel it move.
There’s a joke that Mrs Dickers’ son, Jonno, used to tell when we were kids. What is black and white and red all over? (The newspaper.)
I think I’ve become a joke: what is brown and white and blue all over?
I’m almost at the bar when I see a couple of people walk through the main doors. A girl and a guy. Her hair is brown and she’s got large dangly earrings on. It hits me like a fist in the face. It’s Sally. With Bob. He’s got his arm around her shoulders. He’s whispering in her ear. She’s laughing. He kisses her on the cheek. The redhead at the bar slaps the bottle of coke on the counter in front of me and I reach into my pocket for the money but my fingers won’t work. I fumble with the coins and hand a pile over, uncounted. I grab the coke and head for the side door.
A snake in the grass:
1. A treacherous person
2. A secretly disloyal friend
3. Hidden danger.
I’m back in my room lying on my bed. I’m breathing fast. I can’t decide if the fear is the kind of fear I should have had more of before Blue, or the kind of fear I’ve go
t too much of since Blue. The room is slowly closing in on me. An orange jigsaw coffin. I’m going to suffocate inside an orange jigsaw coffin at the Humpty Doo Hotel. The place where everything is done wrong or upside down.
There’s a knock on the coffin. I get up and go to the door. I can’t open it.
Knock, knock, knock.
I wait for Sally’s voice. Bob’s.
‘Barry. You in there, Barry?’
Knock, knock, knock.
It’s not Sally’s or Bob’s voice. I open the door.
‘Ah. You are in there.’ It’s Bessy without her morning apron. ‘Got a letter for ya, love. Came in the post today. Here you go.’ She passes the letter across the doorframe. My lips quiver in the makings of a thank you smile, but they only manage a flutter.
‘You comin’ over?’ She stretches her thumb in the direction of the pub. ‘I saw your sweetie inside.’
‘No. Thanks.’ I close the door. I hear Bessy’s footsteps on the path outside. Crunching on the loose gravel.
I turn the envelope over in my hands. There’s no name or address on the back. It’s slim and small. Not official government-style correspondence. This is personal. I put it underneath the magnet on the fridge and lie back down on the bed. The walls stop moving but I close my eyes anyway. I don’t want to think about the letter or anything, but I keep seeing Sally and Bob in the pub. I feel like Sally has disappeared into the same place my father is. A black empty hole.
I’ve spent so long holding my fathers’ names in my hand that the piece of paper looks like I’ve dug it up from the ground somewhere. The letters are smudged and angled with creases and folds in the paper. I’ve read them in my head, over and over, like a spack. I keep trying to think them into something real. Maybe Sally was never real either and the feel of her, still here beside me, is just my imagination. And maybe Stumpy and Boomboom really are the guys back in the bar and one of them really is my father.
22
The Story of Stumpy Johnson and Boomboom Green
Grenades were being thrown that night. The sky was lit up like a fireworks show, but no one was watching. Men were cowering in the bushes, pushing their bodies into the mud and thinkin’ of nothing much at all. The metal of the guns was the only thing that mattered. The feel of it cold and hard and real in their hands. Blinking away the sweat and filth to aim straight and shoot the Commie bastards. A man forgets who he is when that kind of fear races through his body. Nothing beyond the next second means much at all. It could all disappear in an instant. Life, that is. A man could be just a mush of bones and blood if he’s not careful. And what use are dreams and hopes if that’s what’s waiting at the end of another minute.
Two boys, barely men, their skin dark from their own blood and black from the camouflage markings, squashed themselves on the ground with their hands over their heads. They went to Vietnam to fight like men. They had no choice about being sent, but they were both glad of it.
What a way to see the world!
Come back set for life.
Good money, good benefits.
But there, on the ground under fire, none of that mattered any more. There, they cowered like frightened boys.
‘Don’t you give up, you bastard,’ the taller one whispered to his friend. ‘Or I’ll bloody kill you myself.’
‘You’re all hot air.’
‘Don’t try me.’
The little bloke was silent and his mate knew a wound like that could kill a man if he let go and gave in. The leg had been hit bad.
The tall bloke had watched as his mate fell under a rain of bullets. Going down on the ground, crumpling in a mess of green and brown and black and fear. Thinking for a second that he was all alone. The last man standing. And then he heard his mate screaming, saw him clutching at his leg, which was red and mushy and leaking all over. He wasn’t dead, he was okay. All he had to do was to get him to hold on.
‘I know this place back home. There’s this girl. She’s beautiful. Some blokes have to pay but I’m special, if you know what I mean. Anyway, she’s waiting and I’m going back to her no matter what. And you’re coming with me, you hear!’
His mate coughed. It was good enough.
‘Come on, you bastard, we’ll tell our kids about this someday.’ His friend’s silence scared him more than the roar of guns and grenades around him. Beside him the ground shattered, clumps of mud and grass were blown into the air and fell back down on their bodies like hail.
‘Dolly’s her name, mate,’ he shouted at his friend. The ground shook their bones, the sky threw things at them, and everything around could leap out and end their life.
He’d found Dolly in a small town and, while he was only a boy himself, she had made him feel ten feet tall. He’d loved her in his own way. Or loved what she could do to him. She was something to hold on to, at any rate. Something to make surviving seem possible, worthwhile even. At least she was life, waiting somewhere familiar. The thought of home.
‘Come on, hold on.’
‘If a grenade doesn’t get us first, the sound of your booming mouth will tell ’em where to shoot,’ his mate answered in scattered gasps.
Boomer talked to his friend for what seemed like hours before the earth fell silent and their men came for them. He looked down from the chopper back at the ground where they had been. He could see them both, those stupid, fearless boys who’d come to the jungle to beat their own chests and they were dead. They were still there on the grass below, just an impression on the grass.
They never called each other by those long lost names that belonged to those kids. Just Boomboom and Stumpy. Stumpy never did lose his leg, though – the scare was close enough – and they both made it back home more or less intact.
Years later, when hope was lost again to each of them for different reasons, they came back to seek her. She had been reason enough to survive once. They would talk about Dolly Mundy, but not the war.
They need me, thought Dolly Mundy. She was saving them in her own way.
23
Boof is quiet. He doesn’t say anything when he picks me up. At first I’m relieved and then I’m worried. It’s just not like him.
‘Something wrong?’ I ask.
Boof scratches his head and swallows hard. ‘Bait’s in a bad way.’
Shit. I can’t imagine Boof without Bait. I never liked the little bugger but I wouldn’t want him dead.
‘Bloody snakes,’ Boof mumbles, but it’s not even directed at me.
‘Bloody menace,’ I add.
He looks reassured. He nods and his knuckles whiten where he grips the wheel.
‘He’ll be right,’ I say. ‘He’s a tough little blighter. Besides. It’s not right that he’s around crocs all day only to be taken by a snake.’ I suddenly realise it doesn’t sound nearly as helpful as I intended.
Boof’s quiet for a bit then he smiles. ‘I reckon you’re right, Barramundy.’
A thought occurs to me. ‘How come Cassie’s never in the car in the mornings, Boof?’
‘I pick her up and drop her off, then I come back and get you.’
‘Oh,’ I say, thinkin’.
‘We don’t live together. I’ve been trying to get her to move in with me for years but she says she likes her independence. We’re still together, though. See, she had this real bastard for a bloke before she met me. Sold everything she had and they bought a house together. Got married, the whole bit. Then he run off on her. Took everything and left her dry.’
‘And...’ I begin to add something I have no real idea about.
‘And then she met me. Been together six years, yet she still can’t bring herself to make a proper go of it.’
‘Yeah.
’ I try to sympathise, but I’ve got no idea about anything. ‘I suppose you could always move into her place,’ I add.
Boof sits up higher in his seat. He looks over at me and smiles. ‘You’re a bloody marvel, Barra. It never occurred to me.’
Boof’s mind is busy thinkin’ on the new way things could work out for him. My arm rests on the window frame and I’m lookin’ through the window at the trees and termite mounds and the colours all changing and blending in together. I remember George from my last job telling me about Fogg Dam near Humpty Doo. It’s out there, just over the horizon.
George told me about how one time Humpty Doo was like a Chinaman’s goldmine back in the fifties. Said how a fancy man from Hollywood invested all this money in the place for rice farming. Thought it was going to end up the next fertile Nile, running along the Adelaide River. He told me how it brought stacks of work to the place. Really put Humpty Doo on the map. All these farms for rice. And then it all went belly up. It never did work out. What with the wild buffalo running all over the place, stamping out the crops. The unpredictable weather. And birds. Crows and kites getting stuck into the seedlings. The Humpty Doo wild. Everything wrong and upside down. Can’t beat nature up the Top End. And then the place was turned into Fogg Dam. Bird habitat. And never mind a few crocs in the mix as well. I admire the way things work around here. Can’t be tamed or tuned to a man’s way of working. Can’t be hemmed in and kept tidy. That’s when I got to thinkin’ about comin’ here. To check the place out. Humpty Doo. Sounded like just the place for a broken git like me.
Barramundy sat on a wall.
Barramundy had a great fall.
No magic forces and no policemen
Could ever put Barra together again.
I think I know who the letter’s from. And I don’t want to know what it says.
I get busy with the day’s work. I hack into the pig meat like it’s my own personal punishment on the world. And I’m surprised at how good it feels to stick the hook in. Bob said ‘hello’ and I ignored him. Sally tried to talk to me and I ignored her, mumbling something about pig meat, hooks and hungry crocs.
Brown Skin Blue Page 11
