Wild Cat Falling

by Mudrooroo

  The flashlight reveals heaps of junk — a rusty forged iron plough and odd parts of agricultural implements. Behind them is a window leading into the shop. I take the torch and hand the jemmy to Jeff. “Try and lever it up.” He slips a wedge end under the sash. The old lock squeaks and twists and the frame rises to make a fingerhold. Good. I lift the window cautiously. The inside gapes like a toothless mouth and we wriggle through, feet first. Jeff takes the torch, puts the jemmy in his belt, and cups the beam in his hand.

  I search quickly in the shrouded gleam for anything that might hold cash. No luck yet, but I find a rack of rifles, pick up a .22 calibre and a box of ammunition. I unclip the eight shot magazine and press in the slug. Like feeding a baby. Fine. With the weight of a weapon in my hand I feel secure and confident.

  We find an unlocked door and enter noiselessly. It is an office. Lucky break. We pull out drawers and toss out files. No money. I try the desk. The locked drawer must be where they keep the lolly. The jemmy bursts it easily and the cash box inside is not even locked. We stuff notes and coins into our pockets. Plenty time later to share it out. Nothing else here worth taking except the rifle, and I have that.

  “Right,” I whisper. “Let’s go.”

  Back in the yard again, and a faint noise resolves itself into the heavy tread of boots. Only one set of footsteps, but coming down hard and solid, echoing purpose and authority. Clump, clump. Pause. The rattle of a chain and the snap of a padlock.

  “Hell! Sounds like a cop.”

  We dare not use the torch as we dash across the yard towards the stack of stuff we noticed on the way in. I kick a tin as I dive for shelter and the noise echoes through the night like a thunderclap. The footsteps slow down and stop and a powerful flash- beam roves the yard probing into the darkest corners among the stack of oil drums. I’m real scared now, as the light moves mercilessly towards our hiding-place. Sweat-scared.

  In seconds endless vistas of grey jail memories pass through my mind. Bleak greyness of prison walls, sterile white of the square cells, cold grey light of the corridors, dreary, grey drag of the long days. God how I struggled to harden my spirit to its misery. Told myself I didn’t care any more. It didn’t make much difference where I was — one place much like another — all dreary and all a drag. Prison a refuge of a sort where I was nearer belonging than anywhere. But now in these crazy two days I have felt the sun again and seen the sky and breathed the fresh, sweet air. Does it have to be over again so soon? Must I just wait and take it like before? Why should I, when I have this power in my hands? None of them ever spared me. Why should I spare one of them? I fumble in the dark with the bolt of the rifle and a bullet clicks sharply into place. The torch beam swings and slaps me full in the face. I blink and panic and the rifle explodes with a crack of doom into the blinding light. The weapon leaps in my hand. A short exclamation of surprise or pain, a heavy thud and the light blacks out.

  Mind screams “Run, run, run”, but I crouch petrified. I hear a sobbing whisper in my ear as Jeff leaps from hiding and runs past to the gate. “Hurry. Get the bloody hell out of here.”

  I spring into action and scramble after him. Lights flash on in house windows along the street where we have left the car. Jeff is heading that way. He doesn’t know the layout of this place and is making into a trap. I turn the other way, across the railway line, past the shadowy goodsheds and the big wheat silo, silvery grey in the starlight, past the stock pens and into the dark refuge of the bush. Heart pounding, breath a ragged gasping of air, I am clutching my rifle for dear life. So dear, dear life.

  A mile or so now between my fear and the town, and after stumbling and falling through the scrubby undergrowth my eyes have grown more accustomed to the dark. I see that I have come on some wheel tracks. I stop and take my bearings. The town that way. This way, two, three miles on, should be the hill I used to climb. This must be the little track old Mr Willy made with his horse and dray.

  Small sounds of waking birds drop sharply into the massive silence as I flip flop between the tortured limbs of paperbarks and the ghost-stark trunks of the gums.

  What will it be this time if they catch up with me? Hanging for sure. If I killed that cop. Or life. Hanging would be better. Quick short drop to everlasting void. Not peace. Just nothingness. I reason with myself, but terror takes me by the throat and my knees go weak.

  A sharp stick finger jabs my cheek and I let out a yelp of pain. It acts as a stimulus to my fear-numbed brain and steadies my nerves. I feel the blood trickling down my cheek, wipe it away with my sleeve and keep on walking, feet feeling out the narrow strip of saneness through the crazed bush.

  fourteen

  A first grey glow of dawn spreads from the horizon and out through the bush. A shadow moves from the shadow of a tree. My rifle springs up defensively. Reason tells me it is a kangaroo, instinct that it is a man..I release the safety catch, stop dead and wait. A terrible tiredness has come over me, leaving me drained of all power to feel or act. The shadow comes quietly, soundlessly, on along the sandy track. A man or the ghost of a man stops a few yards from me. I stand dead still in my black clothes against the blackened bole of a tree, but I sense that eyes are feeling me out, feature for feature, limb for limb.

  “You look done in, boy.” An old voice, deep and soft — not a white man’s voice. “No good to feel that way.”

  “I got lost,” I say. “Been walking all night.”

  “You need a spell,” he says. “I got a camp over there.”

  Too right I need a spell, but dare I take the risk? What the hell. He can’t know who I am or what I’ve done and, anyway, he’s so old. I follow him off the track into the bush until the glow of a fire marks the camp in a clearing near the foot of the big hill. There is a lean-to that seems to be made of branches, paper- bark and hessian bags, and over the fire, suspended between forked sticks, hangs a steaming billycan. The old man leans to stir the coals, and I see that he is a thoroughbred — not mongrel like me. A thick mop of white hair throws up the blackness of his lined face. The skin of his hands is cracked with age, the hands themselves, long fingered, supple, almost delicate. His bare, dusty feet are stumpy and look tough as leather. Something about him twangs a chord of memory. Where have I seen him before, what do I know of him?

  “Sit down,” he says. “I get you a feed first and you can sleep.”

  He comes out from the shelter with a metal plate and spoon, stirs the billy and ladles food onto the plate. I’m starving and the stew is good. I wolf it down.

  “Jessie Duggan’s boy,” he says, like talking to himself.

  The food sticks in my throat. “No,” I say. “I’m a stranger here.”

  “You’re in trouble, son.”

  “I come out after kangaroo,” I say, “and I get lost. That’s all.”

  “I known your mummie and your grandmummie. That old woman, she been my tribal sister you know. She call me brother, only your mummie can’t call me uncle any more. She got to forget all that in the mission school.”

  I look at the broad, black face in the growing daylight and memory sounds a clear note. The old rabbiter who used to come to our house sometimes — the one my mother warned me about. A bit crazy and might be dangerous, she said, and I was never to talk to him. He must be the one the kids said was a magic man who talked the language of the bush animals. But that seems a lifetime ago. Fancy him still around. He doesn’t look dangerous now and probably never was. I expect it was just this tribal relative idea of his that worried Mum. Maybe it was even true, but that side of my heritage must be kept from me at all costs. I must live white and learn to think with a white man’s mind.

  He sits in the swelling daylight and nods at me quietly across the fire. I finish eating and put the plate on the ground. “Thanks,” I say. “I’ve got to get going now.”

  He does not seem to have heard this.

  “Long time you don’t see her, son,” he says.

  “Who?”

  “Your old mum
mie.”

  I feel a sudden prick of shame. “No, she lives in the city now. I can’t get there much.”

  He shakes his head quietly.

  “She come back here.”

  “To this town?”

  “That Noongar camp, close up.”

  “Mum in the Noongar camp?”

  “She got nobody, only them, son. They look after her all right, but I think she die soon.”

  I push from my mind the thought of the squalid shacks, slapped together from bits and pieces off the rubbish dumps, the dirt floors and the leaking roofs — aching hot in summer, cold and wet in the winter’s rain — Mum with her fastidious ways lying on filthy blankets and old bags. Mum, with her phoney pride, dependent on the kindness of the people she reared me to despise. The Noongar mob, shiftless and hopeless, but with a sort of strength, a blood call to their kind that she knew and feared.

  So now she has gone back to die with them and be buried in that back part of the cemetery in a nameless Noongar grave. Serve her right. She had it coming to her, pretending to be better than the rest of them, keeping me away from them, giving me over like a sacrificial offering to the vicious gods of the white man’s world. The Noongars have their vices all right. They take their sex like they take their grog — wherever and whenever it comes along. They brawl and bash each other up, gamble the shirts off their backs and make fools of anyone who tries to help them, but they have a warmth and loyalty to each other and a sort of philosophy of life the whites will never know or understand. We would both have been better off if we had stuck with them.

  Well, no use pretending any more with this old bloke. He knows me, and all about me probably, except this latest episode. He takes a blanket that has been spread on the slope of his humpy, and offers it to me.

  “Go in there now, son,” he says. “Have a good sleep now.”

  His face is furrowed but simple and calm. No madness there. No sign of bitterness or the shifty look of the old black cadgers who hang around the country towns. I don’t know what sort of a relative he thinks he is, but it means something to him and I guess he won’t give me away. I take the blanket and curl up on the ground inside the hut. . . .

  Falling, falling. Plunging and twisting out of the sky. Down and down and the dark ground rising up. . ..

  I wake with a pounding heart and sit bolt upright, remembering. I’ve got to face the day and this hole I’m in. Can’t stay here and talk to a crazy old nigger with all the cops in the district combing the bush for me. Got to get up and move on. I’ve killed a cop back there and I’m in for it if I don’t think clear and act shrewd. Get my bearings and head East. Pinch another car if I can and get out of the State. I can lose myself over East. Grow a beard. Dress differently. No mercy for a man who kills a cop. I’m not sorry for him. All cops deserve to die, but most people don’t see it that way and the world’s going to be more against me now than it ever was.

  I look around the hut. On an upturned box there is a battered pannikin, a couple of spoons, a butcher’s knife and a cracked cup containing a few shillings. I put my head outside and look around, blinking in the white glare of the mid-day sun. No sign of the old man. The old bastard’s probably gone to put me in. I was a fool to trust him. Should have remembered you can’t trust anyone.

  I take the money out of the cup and put it in my pocket. I’ve got all this other cash from the job at the hardware store, but I’m going to need all I can get, and more. My hand hovers over the knife. I hear a sound and look outside again. The old codger’s coming back alone across the clearing, dangling some rabbits on a stick and droning his dreary blackman’s song. It gets on my nerves. I drop the knife and put my hands over my ears.

  He walks slowly to the fire, puts down the rabbits and peers into the hut. “Just been to the traps,” he says. “Fresh meat for dinner now.”

  I crawl out and get on my feet.

  “I’m on my way.”

  I think he’s going to ask me “Where?” but he just nods and says, “You got a long way to go, son. Better eat while you got the chance.”

  I look at the limp, furry bodies by the fire. “No time,” I say.

  He goes to the billy, sniffs it, nods and tips the contents on a plate. I eat standing up while he reaches into the hut for his knife and begins to skin his catch. I put the plate down and he smiles at me again. “Wait a tick,” he says, getting to his feet. “I got a few bob here put by. You might be glad of it.”

  I stand rooted to the spot until he returns with the empty cup in his hands. He looks at me quietly and I feel he is reading my whole life from my face. Everything, as long back as I can remember, even before. So what? I tell myself. What do I care for an old abo crank in beggar’s clothes?

  I look him straight in the face with my practised sneer. His eyes are faded like potch opal, but clear and sad. Not judging me, only seeing how I am. I feel the blood flushing up my neck and over my face and I hang my head. No one ever made me feel this way before. No one. Not the magistrate, or the probation officer, or the brothers with all that thunder about the eye of God. Not even my Mum’s suffering face.

  I take the money from my pocket and drop it back in the cup.

  He shakes his head. “You take it, son. I don’t have much use for it.”

  He puts the cup on the ground, then sits cross- legged and goes quietly on with his job. I want to run and hide my shame in the bush, but something holds me here. He begins to sing again, softly, like the humming of a bee, then the words shape on his lips and he breaks off.

  “You know that song, son.”

  “Suppose I heard it somewhere before,” I say.

  “You dream it,” he says. “It belong your country.”

  “I haven’t got a country,” I say. “I don’t belong anywhere.”

  “You can’t lose it,” he says. “You go away, but you keep it here.” He claps his hands under his ribs. “Inside. You dream that place and that song too. I hear you sing it in your sleep.”

  “I have a dream,” I say, “but I don’t remember when I wake up. A sort of falling dream.”

  “Might be your granny teach it when you been a little fella. Desert country.” He makes a pointing motion with his chin.

  “I don’t remember any grandmother.”

  “Good woman,” he says, “properly blackfella. No white blood.”

  “You knew her?” I ask.

  “My sister,” he says simply. He nods. “She give you that song might be.”

  I want to go, but something holds me here. “What does it mean, anyway?”

  “Belong dreaming time,” he says. “That cat want to live a long time like the old crow. ‘How you don’t die?’ he asks. ‘I fly up high, high up to the moon. I get young up there, then come down.’ That cat look sorry then. ‘I got no wings.’ Then the old crow laugh carr-carr. ‘You don’t need no wings. You can fly all right. You try now.’ See?”

  The old voice trails on, but now I have remembered the dream. It has been in some secret part of my mind to which he has given me the key.

  In it I somehow play both parts, and I am also the spectator. I feel the sudden surprised wonder of flight — a trick of some leg muscle, as though rediscovered from a past bird life. I soar into the air with my cat body and my crow’s wings, up and up. Almost there. Almost. Don’t look down. Keep your cat-crow eyes on the swelling, bright face of the moon. Not down. Not down. But the old earth is pulling you. Got to look down. Crow laughs and cat hates. He has been deceived. It is a trick. Have to have wings to reach the moon. . . . Crow laughing, car-carr-carrr. . . . Wild cat plunging downwards through the night with terror in its glazed cat eyes. I am watching and the terror is my own. I am the crow laughing to see such fun. It is I falling, falling, plunging to my certain doom. I wake with the doom pounding at my heart.

  The dream remembered and some long ago reality of a childhood fall — a slip knot giving way from round the high branch of a tree — falling, falling to oblivion. Don’t remember hitting
the ground. Only the fear and then the waking up with a bandage round my head. Why did I have to wake? Why must the old man recall for me this terrible foreshadowing?

  The urgency of my plight comes over me afresh.

  “Thanks for the food and everything. I have to go now.”

  He dives into his hut and brings out the rifle. I look at it in his outstretched hand. I’ve got a few slugs in my pocket, but I don’t see myself using it now. Only something to carry.

  “You can keep it,” I say.

  He shakes his head. “It only make trouble for me. I got no gun licence you know.” He looks at me steadily. “Might make trouble for you, too.”

  “It’s done that already.”

  I take the rifle from his hand. I don’t want to kill anyone else, but if it comes to the point I might need it for myself. Better to end the nightmare that way.

  “Wait,” he says. “You want some water this time of year.” He hitches the strap of his canvas bag over my shoulder. “I got a spare somewhere. Fill it up every chance you get.”

  I nod. “Which way’s East?”

  He motions again with his chin. “Take that old track,” he says, and puts a hand on my arm as I turn to go. “This country knows you all right, son. You keep to the bush.”

  At a turn in the track I glance back and lift a hand. The old man is bent to his task again, but the comforting melancholy of his chant reaches out to me as I hurry on.

  I don’t know where the track is leading, but the bush seems more friendly now. I think how part of me once hunted in this forest of gums and banksias, how I was naked then and swung easily along with my light bundle of spears and boomerangs and the heart inside of me light and free. These clothes I have on are heavy-hot, but I am too soft to throw them away. The water-bag and the rifle are heavy, too, and my feet have no spring in them.