Shoved in the front of a plush leather seat, someone getting in with keys on a chain with a silver tractor. Vicki Genoni with the kindness in her made-up eyes. “You boys are like children!” she says. I want to tell her I haven’t been plastered in years, haven’t been in a fight since I left here, since I punched her husband just the other day. She fishes past me into the glovebox, pulls purple Handi Wipes from a container. “That Sharen Wells.” She shakes her head in disbelief.
I try to apologize for ruining her New Year’s but I can’t seem to speak. The car clock says it’s only 11:11. It smells of orange oil and sanitizer. A Lexus with a burled wood interior. I dab my oozing hand with the moist towelette, think of Isabel trying to keep things clean. Where she might be now—if she witnessed this she’d be gone for good and ever.
As we cross the highway, past the eerie black inlet, I wonder if I’d have married a woman like Vicki would I have stayed? Been comfortable or miserable or even happy. “That Sharen Wells,” I repeat like a retard, who turned on my father and me. Who wouldn’t blame her?
“Poor woman,” she says with strange compassion. Does she have no idea? Bobby inviting Sharen to stay with them after she lit the car on fire. Bobby probably poking her in the spare room. I pat the side of my head for signs of blood; examine the wipe for evidence in my hand. The tiniest spot.
“Are you a Christian?” I ask.
“I try to be,” she says and I wonder if there’s something in it. A road to generosity, this kind of heartfelt samaritanism. If one can’t be like that anyway. She makes me feel so obsessed with myself, slumped here like a carcass. Rising bile that makes me think I might need to open the door. The sight of the crowd still at the caravan park, their fire now in a drum. It makes me nauseous, Ruthie left alone. “Poor devils,” says Vicki, seeing the shadows. I don’t ask if her belief stretches to the devil or hell. That’s when it all gets crazy. I just hope Walker’s there on a stump with a beer among his fellow itinerants. When I’m drunk on my ass, beat on the head by this woman’s old man. Trying not to lose it on her fancy dashboard.
“How are you faring?” asks Vicki and I appreciate her choice of words. We pass the half-fallen sign for Wedding Bush Road, the turn to that godforsaken cottage, and I wonder where Reggie is now.
“Bobby got me this time,” I tell her, try to make light of it, my croaking voice precarious, the tender spot on the side of my head. I feel for swelling under my hair.
“He just envies you,” says Vicki, turning into the drive, the big house barely lit on the hill. “The one who got away.”
She parks her Lexus by the dome of the underground tank. Water saved for fires when there’s none to keep the garden alive. “Would you like to have gotten away?” I ask.
“It’s good for me here,” she says and I feel an unusual contentment. People who live without the restless need for elsewhere, different, more.
“Will you be all right?” she asks as I climb out in pieces, like my father does, but I’m half his age. Standing as if my blood runs weak.
“Thanks, Vicki, I’ll manage,” pat the top of her shiny roof. The moon a gold cradle low in the sky beyond it. A shape on one of the slated gables above the house, a tall, pale bird, a heron come inland, spreads its wings and flies off, coalesces with the night. Unsure if I’m imagining, I kneel in what could be confused with prayer and vomit in a rosebush.
Wait up in this casuarina to keep watch out for Walker. Close my eyes and ask for Uncle Worry dead for years but I still see him. Watery eyes all deep and droopy, I seen him in photos years back. On this farm. Shut my eyes and imagine him coming down with old lawmen from Gundagai, their chests chalked white and red with clay, they’ll leave their trucks and piss their fire, come looking for me when the moon gets up. Amazing how the old men run, almost as if they are floating. No one even notice them in the windbreaks, the old ones coming. Karadji in his coat. Won’t let Walker hurt Ruthie or drag me back to Yarram stealing horses, ride for miles at night with just a bridle through farms and up into the hills until he has enough to send to the killers, disguise them all by cutting manes and paint them Appaloosa with my dots. And I feel Worry whisper, Move Reggie. They come run cross-country, old men. Makes Reggie wanna lie down in the clearing and cover himself in feed sacks. But Worry in the wattles whooping as if he’s some extincted bird to warn me how Walker comes wild to brute me, tie me in the back of a truck. Hear the three black horses canter through the ground and make my run as they do to protect me. Worry sing me past, make me shoes so soft all covered in feathers and leave no trace like a stone into the hollow of a neck. Just hope they get here in time.
RUTHIE SLEEPS AND I’m still shit-faced. Curl up on something soft, the dog’s sheepskin beside her bed. I collapse into sleep, dream of a lightning storm and horses plowing through barbed wire, their chests ripped open, running through the halls, a wind that drags up the giant pine at its roots and makes a huge cave that swallows all the cattle. Then I wake to a rattling wind on the glass and the rumble of hooves. Struggle up with a foul taste in my mouth and the side of my face already swollen. In the front hall, I lean and peer through the pain in my eyes, out the leadlight on the door. A figure with a stick? In the darkness I can’t tell. I sway to the door and the moon comes out from behind the sky, a dark silhouette staring out at the shadows. “Fuck off,” I yell, squinting to see. “All of you.”
A quick knock on the door. “Daniel, it’s me, Reggie.” Pleading.
He’s never said my name before. I open the door to turn on the porch lamp but he stops me. All I make out are the long-shanked cypresses roiling in a crazy wind, and the boy—shirtless, standing on one leg as if he’s guarding the house. “What is it?”
As though he sees what I can only hear: the horses snorting, bumping up along the post and rail, the thud of cattle, the earth reverberant. As if the paddocks might rise up and explode. I grab for some boots.
“Stay here,” says Reggie. His hand on my arm, warm and light and the hot moist air feels heavy against me; I try to crawl back into my skin. The call of a bird almost human. I feel him strain to see. A clacking like horses trotting on cement. “We should check the stock,” I hiss.
“No.”
Normally, the word would scorch me silent, being ordered about like that, but tonight the blackness seems too weird and alive, the horses and trees all coupled together. Then I notice his leg is wrapped in a shirt. “Are you all right?” I ask. The back of his neck glistens with sweat in the moonlight.
“Got cut,” he says, “but I got away.” As he turns he wrinkles up as though whatever happened really scared him.
A loose branch sweeps across the lawn then a white flash. A white pony canters past, out on the drive. Is it one of the missing? Gates must be open. I feel as though I’m losing my bearings or haven’t quite woken. Passed out somewhere in a ditch. But Reggie doesn’t shift from the steps, half in and half out, beneath the lip of the veranda, and something rolls close by, behind the trees. A birdcall then the shadows half-open and the mouth of the wind bears a thing in the air that glints and Reggie buckles. He cups his stomach as I crouch beside him. The pungent smell of his sweat and the fear in it, blood vessels burst in his eyes. “Slingshot,” he says, his voice has a quaver. “I’m okay,” he says but I can tell he isn’t. He reaches out for the small rounded rock in the dirt and tries to stand. “He’s trying to . . .” wiping his eyes on the back of his hand. I herd him back into the house as another stone ricochets off a veranda post, the sound of a tuning fork, the hollow iron column.
Reggie limps up into the hall where the light from Ruthie’s room drapes out on the shape of her standing in her nightgown, squinting and disoriented. He turns away, not wanting her to see him crying and now I can see his leg, blood seeping through his shirt. I close the door and lock it. He tries to stand straighter but he’s clearly unable, his young skin scalloped about his eyes, cradling his bare ribs. “We been checking on things, me and Daniel.”
She sear
ches our faces, looks down at the whittled piece of wood Reggie leans on, the one she threw in the water. He covers the stain on his leg with a narrow hand. “You both look pale as ghouls,” she says. I take her brittle fingers in my hand and they feel cold and bony, and I feel as if everything’s swaying. Through the leadlight window, the shadows play games in the wind; a branch chafes at the corrugated roof. “Horses are loose; it’s gone wild out there.”
My mother straightens a picture of herself on the drop-side table. She’s in the past, as a girl, jumping high over a wide triple bar at the old Ranelagh Club. “You two can sort him out,” she says. She puts the book, The Ropes of Time, facedown on the chair in the hall.
“I’m calling the cops,” I say and Reggie’s face falls.
“Family business,” my mother says. “Anyway, it’s New Year’s. They wouldn’t get here for a week.” She heads back to her room, a hand on the doorjamb for balance.
“You should’na done my mother,” says Reggie, sweat in his eyes. “He don’t like it was you.”
I try not to nod as I move down the hall; the house seems to roll like a ship.
“The police will take me,” says Reggie.
“And what will Walker do?”
“Wants me to catch the horses. Ride them to the hiding yards. Truck comes. Takes them off.” I imagine Bobby Genoni’s Cousin Angel from Meeniyan in some old green Bedford, the loading ramp on the side.
“Can’t you just run away?”
We jump at the sight of a skewbald pony in the main dining room. Reggie looks at me doe-eyed, as if it isn’t his fault. A pony and a piano. I touch the new swelling on the side of my head; try to get my eyes to focus. What world is this I’ve fallen into? I find the number for the Pakenham police on the list, the new one I added. As I pick up the receiver to dial, Reggie limps toward me.
“We’re under threat.” I tell the operator, but a sound, a shot or a stone, comes crashing through the stained-glass window. I kneel for cover as Reggie reaches and places the stick across the switch hook. “We’re at Tooradin Estate,” I say but the line’s gone dead.
“Ruthie said no police,” he says, collapses in my mother’s chair, nursing his stomach, and Patch, my mother’s pony, now stands in the hall, come out from the dining room to see what’s happened.
“Pip’s gone,” my mother says, appearing down the hall with what at first looks like a large cane but as she enters the room I see it’s the Winchester. “Under my bed for fifteen years, waiting for nights like this.” She sits on a stool by the fire and leans the gun against the bookcase, studies Reggie. I don’t know if the rifle’s even loaded and I’m not exactly sure where Reggie’s hurt, but he grimaces in a stab of pain. “He needs a doctor,” I say.
“I heal myself,” he says and he turns, motions instinctively into the kitchen. Out the window a red light flashes in the bush, then two. Taillights. Somehow he sensed the movement way out there.
“I’ll guard Reggie,” my mother says in her nightgown. “He’s done nothing wrong. You go see what they’re up to.”
The pain returns to my head. “So I’m to be sent out to the slaughter.” I don’t admit my condition. “We need an ambulance,” I tell her. “And police protection.”
“You’re not in America now,” says my mother.
“I’ll go, Ruthie,” says Reggie, wincing as he tries to get up. Blood seeps through a knife tear in his jeans.
“No you won’t,” she says. She shifts the gun around so the barrel passes the dark television toward me. “If Daniel wants this land, he’ll go out and protect it.”
Reggie passes me the walking stick as if it might bring luck.
OUTSIDE, THE BLACKNESS drapes me. Ibis squawk from their roosts in the trees in a wind that’s turgid again, laced with a soft whinny, and I can just make out the vague outlines of the big horses, ears pricked on high alert along the fence, watching the red lights in the distance. Not as drunk as I was but it’s a strange, potent feeling as I walk toward the black horses. Walker’s truck arriving, maybe a group of them corralled out in the bush. I could at least get the license number of the lorry, track them down that way.
I traverse the garden, trip over a bucket by the clothesline, the carved stick and a hooked carpet knife I managed to grab on my way through the boot room, imagining yonnies being slung at me through the night. The rabbit burrows in the earth are traps, but I remember these paddocks like the fingers of gloves. The three horses braid into the sable air behind me, as an oddly festive entourage—following me as they did Reggie. They won’t let themselves be taken easily. Silence, save for the sounds of their hooves in the grass and snuffling, an odd humming in the Center Paddock wind, the faint shapes of skittish cattle. The stick in my hand, useless as a tennis racket, but adrenaline drives me now, clearing out my head. Running, imagining a whistling spear in the wind behind me as I used to, running as a kid from The Red Chief, the book from school with the clever chief Gunnerah, the Red Kangaroo. And still the silent red lights.
At the windmill gate, two of the black horses stop short together behind me; the bigger gelding disappeared. The tin vanes whine in the windmill above the brick tank as I strain at a shadow high up on its edge where Reggie had tracked me the first night. Now a figure appears, poised up on that thin line of bricks, there for a second, then gone. I’m still as the fence posts, training my eyes, unsure what’s real and what’s drunk. The stick clenched two-fisted like a bat at the ready, the remaining two horses, my guardians, not spooked at all now the image has gone, then I hear a clacking sound—a few wary heifers down near the trough, the rattle of their hooves and another red-orange flicker in the bush. A shape’s up ahead in the dark and I blink through the sweat that curtains my eyes as I remember riding a train on the Nullarbor, mesmerized by the row of giant emus crossing the horizon, discovering later it was just tumbleweeds, a mirage. Sleights of the wind, shimmerings. But something here feels uncanny, my breathing too loud in my ears.
The horses move forward, inquisitive now, and the figures shift too, half-seen then unseen, playing with me. I sway, try not to betray myself, steady. Another vision, a trunk and a star-flowered wedding bush, the sound of whining. Pip chained up, pawing at a rope harness tied round his face. Happy to see me as I dash to him, slowly use the hook knife, cut electrician’s tape acting as muzzle, careful not to stab him. Why would the leave him like that? A shrill whistle and the whoosh of something, maybe a stone, a figure moving through the field and I don’t care if it’s real or dreamed. I sprint after the dog as he races to the cottage, leaping over fallen logs and rotted posts. Running to scramble the rail into Sharen’s garden. Banging on the door, I kick it wide, heaving for air and standing in a living room still bare save a chair and the lamp and Reggie’s graffiti. Surprised to see Sharen here on the bedroll alone, in shorts and T-shirt, no longer in bikini and see-through, but she has a sling about her shoulder, as if she’s fractured an arm. She holds a baby bottle and in the sling a tiny wallaby cradled in sheepskin, its brown eyes staring at the panting dog that tries to sniff about its narrow face. “What are you doing here?” Sharen asks.
“Reggie,” I gasp, my head pounding, I can hardly hear my voice. “He’s hurt,” I say. “Taillights . . . he shot him. Slingshot.” Hands on my knees as I struggle for air. “His own son.”
Her mouth tightens, she won’t look at me. She puts down the bottle, walks to the window, balancing the animal, the dog jumping up at it. The floorboards stained with wallaby piss and engine grease. She parts the curtains and glances outside. “Where is he?”
“With Ruthie,” I say. “Up in the big house. She has a gun.”
She unfolds the creature from her homemade pouch and puts it down quickly, as though it was another woman I was yelling at on the dance floor. Her naked legs shine from her frayed shorts. The dog stalks the joey as it hops in slow motion, unevenly, long back legs and tail, harelike face. Sharen looks out into the night, at the hill of stringy eucalyptus, presses her lips to
gether as though deciding something. “Sometimes he imagines things,” she says. “That Aboriginal stuff about pointing the bone.” She reaches for the mantel, finds her cigarettes but doesn’t take one. Instead she hugs herself. I notice there’s a shake in her hand and it makes me want to comfort her as she leans down for her boots. “He gets paranoid sometimes,” she says. A ripple in her voice and the way she won’t look at me, I can’t be sure what’s real. She was worried enough the other night, or was that just a ploy? Her savory scent and the wallaby smell, I hug Pip to me. “One time he was up north with Walker and wanted to visit Gracious’s grave. Somewhere near Junee. But Reggie said these Abos drove through and took him prisoner, drove to a place way up near Wilcannia.” I think of the map on the wall in school. A long way, on the road to Menindee. Burke and Wills. “He just disappeared.”
I think of my own imaginings, running around this farm as a boy, and now. “Well he didn’t imagine being hit by a slingshot,” I say. “I saw it happen and then I found Pip tied up with his mouth taped.”
She grabs the baby animal and launches it quietly outside, into the open carport and lets it hop away. I keep hold of the dog so it doesn’t follow. “I thought Reggie’d be safe here,” says Sharen, tying laces.
The gnarl of a truck changing gears, its lights through the trees, low red stars. Is this some game they’re playing to scare us away, some settling of scores? But Sharen seems panicked now too as I head out into the blackness and reach for an old Queensland bridle from its hook beside the outdoor fridge. “How bad is he?” she asks.
I comb the dark for those black horses. “I have no idea.” One horse alone by the garden fence, the mare with the white on her face. It unnerves me how they’re not together, how she’s way back out here. She doesn’t shy away as I pull the bridle over her crown, the familiar feel of dry leather and my thumb in her wet mouth to open it, the jingle of the bit against her teeth. Quickly, I adjust it to fit then buckle the throat latch, hoist myself up. Sharen looks up at me, wanting to come.
Wedding Bush Road Page 18
