True Country Page 12

  ‘Corruption?’

  ‘Well, maybe,’ Gerrard was reluctant. ‘This is the real world, you know. Anyway, I thought I could pay one of the young blokes to drive the bus, out of funds, to the beach and back on Sundays. Even for bringing tourists in when the boat comes in. They could do corroborees in here even, and the community could hire the bus.’

  They had taken a break from the game. Gerrard got out of his seat. ‘More wine?’

  Well, all right then. If you insist.

  As he went over to the refrigerator he demonstrated his exercise bike to them. His torso rocked, his long heavy legs pushed and pushed, and the pedals whirred. They cheered him drunkenly. Going nowhere, and red in the face, he looked at the meter before him which told his speed. He stopped pedalling, and held his hands clasped over his head as if coasting over a finishing line. He had to slide from the saddle suddenly, and put a foot to the floor to stop the bike toppling. ‘Oops.’

  He brought the opened bottle of wine back to the table. ‘Not as good, this one. But still, we won’t notice now, eh?’ And they continued the game.

  ‘You hire the bus out, Gerrard?’ asked Liz. ‘Since you bought it privately and all?’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Gerrard shook his head. ‘Otherwise it wouldn’t last. There wasn’t enough community money to buy one, believe it or not. I thought they might buy it from me later. It’s for the community, it’s for them.’

  ‘And pocket money for you,’ said Liz, with a smile.

  ‘Of course,’ agreed Gerrard, unabashed. ‘For the community’s benefit. Alex and I’ve agreed, it’d be good for the school, the school could hire it too. The real world, Liz. Economics, exchange. What’ve you got to offer, Billy?’ He laughed, and said again, ‘The real world.’

  Nearing the end of the game. Gerrard in front, Liz a close second, Billy a distant last. The second bottle of wine gone, and they’d drunk the beer as well.

  ‘C’mon Billy, what’ve you got?’

  ‘Doubt,’ said Billy.

  ‘Doubt?’

  ‘Yes, doubt.’

  ‘About what?’ laughed Gerrard.

  ‘About me, the past, what I’m doing, where I belong, the future, um...’

  ‘You sound like the mob here,’ slurred Gerrard.

  ‘You’re drunk Billy,’ said Liz. ‘Anyway, you can’t have doubt. Both B’s are on the board and it wouldn’t fit in.’

  ‘Oh.’ His eyes were bloodshot, and he looked tired and pale, a creamy, jaundiced colour.

  Gerrard and Liz, magnanimous in their victory over him, looked at his letters.

  ‘D, T, Y.’

  ‘Look. Here, with OUGHT.’

  ‘DOUGHTY.’

  ‘Don’t have doubt, but be doughty,’ Gerrard and Liz seemed to be laughing at him.

  Gardiya. Whities.

  ‘A good score to end with Billy.’

  ‘Look at the board. What did we start with?’

  BLACK MAGIC BEGIN.

  ‘Wooo. Gotta black magic woman,’ Gerrard was laughing and singing, badly, as he let them out of the door. It was late, dark, and quiet.

  ‘Remember Billy, not doubt but doughty.’ Gerrard yawned, said good night again, and closed the door. The light went out. Billy and his wife yawned their silent way home. Home? To their house.

  Billy, all a totter, was remembering a story Milton had told him, about a visit to Derby. Admittedly Milton was drunk at the time, but he’d seen a snake. But it was not a normal snake.

  Milton Sees

  Now that he was proper sparked up, a bit drunk, Milton wanted to be where it was quieter. Maybe with his brothers and that, playing cards. He stepped out of the bright whirl of laughter and shouts, eyes and teeth, sweaty bodies cold glass beer smells. He stepped out of the Spinifex Hotel and into a dark shower of gravel as a car, wheels spinning and motor snarling, was launched from the car park.

  Not far to walk. With his tax cheque this year he might buy a car, maybe that one from Alex. Maybe a bigger one. Drive around Karnama, in the bush, pushing trees over. Get those girls looking at him. Those schoolgirls, those cheeky ones.

  He jumped a small fence and walked toward the goal posts gleaming in the moonlight on the far side of the oval. It quiet now. Night-time. This was not his country. Maybe he’d go back and sit with those others under that tree opposite the Spinny. Mad bastards them though. Be fighting soon enough, and that Veronica make a man walk like a duck. True.

  Could be ghosts here, on this oval. Quiet night like this. The hiss of cars on bitumen came to him from the far side of the oval. He headed for where the headlights probed under the streetlights there, and felt much relieved to climb the fence onto the path. Safer.

  He saw the snake in front of him. King Brown, at night even, just up a bit and looking right at him. His heart loud and fast and he meant to take a stick and kill it there. But it waited. It waited. It watched him. He knew it. This is not a snake this is a man. He could see it, you know. It was waiting for someone and it had a man’s eyes. Just quiet and proper deadly.

  Milton stepped sideways onto the road and walked wide around it.

  He walked on the side of the road for a long time, looking back where the snake was still waiting, still watching. A car came along and he stepped back onto the path. He was near the Boab Inn now, and he saw some people drinking in that little quiet park opposite. He told them what had happened and they all shot off to his cousin’s house down past the army place.

  Milton fell asleep inside the house later that night and when he awoke it was light. People sitting on the steps drinking from cans. No one fighting. They was just happy. Someone had a ute, and Milton drove to visit another mob with some cartons and some people in the back.

  They just did some drinking, talking, some watched a video.

  Milton sat outside, resting his back against the wall. An old man walked over and sat down next to him.

  He said sideways to Milton, ‘Thanks for not killin’ me.’ Milton nearly laughed. He didn’t know what he was saying. Maybe he was joking. But then he saw the man’s eyes. They were like the snake.

  Stingray

  Billy, Liz, and their students took the bus to the beach. The school could hire the bus cheaply, partly because of the agreement between Gerrard and Alex, but also because of a subsidy from community funds. The trip was in many ways, perhaps, a form of trade-off. Later the students would write about it. So, there they were—Scrap Metal music blasting on the stereo, eskies of food and cool drinks, fishing lines—all chattering and laughing. The new, and somehow soft, bus seemed incongruous with the hard light, the dust, the shimmering trees and bush, and a track that always jostled and shook you up.

  They stop just once, for a tree that had late bush apples. Something like a radish, but injected with air. Like a Chinese Apple, like a red heavy tough bubble, stick-bashed out of a scrubby tree. Billy enjoys the collecting. A kid in the bus shouts out. The bus stops and whoosh! everyone’s off to get bush apple. Figures all through the bush. Appearing, disappearing. A shadow in coloured shirt fits from trunk to trunk; a flurry of them become the kids throwing sticks up into a tree and, in virtually the same motion, plucking the bush apples from the air as they fall, and briefly bounce.

  In the bus, shimmy-shammying through sand and rustling leaves, the kids check each tree is where it should be, and read the tyre prints to see which cars have been where, and name sites. There’s rock paintings in there, I think. They stop for a bit to look.

  We climbed and climbed and we went right up to the top of the rock. From there you look out to the sea and you can see all the beaches and feel the wind. It is a lovely view. We told Sir and Miss if they wanted to see some better rock paintings so we took them right around the rock. They liked them. Then Jimmy went into a cave and we saw paintings of people, animals, tools, and Wandjinas. We also saw some bones of long time ago. But then we thought it might be a Law cave and we were frightened. So we got out, and we did want to go to the beach anyway.

 
At the beach everyone dispersed along the shoreline in small groups. Except Francis of course. And he’s not right, you know. He’s been a little bit sick ever since he was a baby. And maybe he’s a bit spoilt. He’s different; big thick glasses, little bit deaf. He sat on the beach in the shade of the bus and listened to AC/DC on the Walkman that Moses bought for him.

  Billy and Deslie went together. Billy was hoping to learn something about fishing. Walking calf-deep in the tepid water near some mangroves Deslie grabbed Billy’s arm. ‘See, Sir? See? See. Stingray. Good eating sometimes, them ones.’

  Eventually Billy did see. A stingray, some fifty centimetres across, was motionless between where they stood and some rocks before them. ‘You watch it, Sir. I get stick.’

  Deslie crept back from the mangrove’s edge with a thick stick the length of his forearm. Billy pointed unnecessarily to where the stingray remained. Deslie slowly raised the arm holding the stick. He threw it, moving rapidly toward the stingray as he did so. Billy saw the stingray as if flying on the surface of the water, splashing, straining, racing toward open sea. Deslie snatched up the stick from where it was bobbing in the water. He ran through the deepening water in the direction of the stingray’s retreat, the stick above his head. He threw it again, picked it from the water and, running and splashing hard in the thigh-deep water, he threw it a third time. He stopped where the stick had landed, looking around him. He bent over and, with his back arched awkwardly to keep his head above water, began feeling around in the sand. ‘Here somewhere, Sir.’

  Billy looked away, a little embarrassed for Deslie’s sake. It had escaped. His eyes followed the shoreline a few hundred metres to where the others had gathered on the rocks not far from the bus. They were fishing there, and some gathered oysters before the rising tide made it impossible to do so. Billy turned around and Deslie was walking toward him. He held the tail of the stingray in his teeth and his left hand gripped its jaw. His right hand broke off the barbs at the base of its tail.

  ‘Deslie, you’re fantastic.’

  ‘Good eating, Sir, these, when they’re fat.’ He held the stingray flat and belly up on a rock, and cut a small opening with one of the barbs he’d saved. The skin opened as if from a scalpel, showing white flesh. Deslie poked it with his finger. ‘This one no good.’ He dropped the stingray back into the water and kicked at it. Sluggishly, it swam away.

  They walked further around the coast. Deslie asked Billy to work out compass directions using the sun and his watch, the way he’d shown them at school.

  Billy hesitated, ‘It’s only approximate Deslie, and I need a protractor to reckon it accurately.’

  Deslie laughed. ‘I don’t need to do that, eh? Do I, Sir? I don’t need to make those reckonings. I know this country, I’m here, I’m Deslie.’ He pointed to the ground beneath him and rapidly stomped his feet, and they laughed and stomped together, as if dancing in their joy.

  Billy maybe felt a little bit silly then. He was meant to be the teacher. And walking back, under Deslie’s direction, through the twists and curves of the mangroves and the tide rushing in again, he thought of how Deslie no longer used his childhood name because someone of that same name had died in the recent past, and of how Deslie was not of this country, really, any more than Billy himself was. Yet Deslie seemed so confident of who he was. At least, more so than Billy; take away his job at the school and what’s left?

  They all crouched in the shade of the bus and lunched on fish, oysters, sandwiches from school, cordial. ‘You ever hear them spirits, them devils in the mangroves, Miss? You know ’bout them?’ asked Margaret. ‘They got long long hair, and the men, long beards. You hear them, when it’s quiet, if you careful. ’Bout sunset time. Little sounds you know. Them men ones sneak up behind you and steal you away. The women try to whistle, warn you. You know Walanguh, old Walanguh? They took him when he a baby and he did stay with them. That be why his hair all white.’

  They were all watching Billy and Liz, hands frozen in the act of delivering food to their mouths.

  ‘True? Is that true?’

  ‘Yes, that what they say. It true I think, you hear them. My daddy he saw one, one time, at Murugudda.’ They all quietly agreed.

  They were in the bus, with its motor idling, when Deslie remembered he’d left his fishing line on the rocks near the mangroves. He ran to collect it. They watched him running back to the bus through the soft white sand, grinning at them. Behind him the rich blue sea suddenly erupted. A huge manta ray burst into the air close to the shore, and they could see the ocean cascading from its back and beneath it the torn and foaming whorl it had left. For a moment it hung, impossibly, in the air, then fell with a great splash. They could breathe again. Liz felt the bus should have burst into cheering. Deslie looked at them, behind him, at them, and ran faster, not laughing now.

  Visitors in Great White Boats

  Milton and Billy went fishing in Billy’s dinghy. ‘This way.’ Milton’s arm pointed across the smooth ocean toward some land, vague in the distance. He sat at the bow, his shape dark against the milky turquoise sea and the traces of mist which remained above it, as yet untouched by this day’s breeze.

  They skimmed across the ocean. The outboard’s roar was left behind them, and the aluminium hull amplified the skip and tap of the sea. A lone dolphin flashed across their bow, dark and swift, and flew, once, for a blinking time only, clear of the water, splashing them, before looping away into its own blue silence.

  Milton knew a place around the headland. He was returning there, to that place, the one quite close to the rocks and red beach, but where the water is very deep. The old people used to walk there. Milton and Billy motored slowly to and fro across it, dragging silver lures. Occasionally the lures broke the surface. Great fish sprang from the deep, and silver arcs flashed past the boat. Sometimes a lure was hit clear of the water.

  The sudden singing of a line as it tautened. The queenfish Milton brought in; it shot into the air shaking itself to free the lure from its mouth. Milton kept the line taut. The line cut the water as the fish swam deep, and it burned in his hand. Billy had silenced the motor. A tension, a singing line. The fish leapt again, it seemed in slow motion, and hung in the air for a moment, a template held against the blue hues of sea and sky with a crowd of silver droplets feeing it.

  Milton hauled it in, and the gaff pierced its armour of scales. Red blood spurted over the floor of the dinghy, and over their bare feet as the big fish thrashed among the stiff corpses of its fellows. They cursed each fish with joy, and with a tiny whispering fear as they saw the sun fade in each great, glassy, dying eye.

  There were little suns all around them. They bounced from the knife blade, the aluminium of the dinghy, the ocean’s surface as the sea exhaled. Little suns sparkling thorns. The sea breeze began.

  Returning around the headland they saw the catamaran which brought the rich tourists. It was moored out from where they’d left the car. They circled it in the dinghy, not having seen it up close before. The few staff remaining on board came out and called down to them as they tossed around in the echo of their motor and the chop bouncing off the large hull.

  Someone invited them aboard, so they tied the dinghy to the catamaran and were led through small upholstered rooms, treading the carpets in their blood-caked feet. They sat at the bar with the crew and shared a beer with them, and spoke in embarrassed belches. It was small and muffled after being in the spread of the sea, under the roofless sky, in their tiny resonating dinghy, yet they spoke beneath those low ceilings as if across a great distance. The tourists and some of the crew had gone into the village to have a look. There was a corroboree tonight, for the tourists. Milton had forgotten, Billy hadn’t heard.

  It’s a good idea, that crew said, having the bus take the tourists into the settlement itself. Must be rough on the bus though.

  They took the dinghy ashore, waving their thanks to the crew gathered at the top of the ladder. The catamaran looked more impressive from th
e shore with its white paint sparkling as it slowly turned on its mooring, its shape and size so novel along this coast. It looked so out of place, so pristine, and so, well, advanced that it could have been a spaceship.

  Halfway back to the camp they came across the bus. The chassis at the rear rested on the ground, and the vehicle sat at an uncomfortable angle. It had become bogged, and Raphael, revving the motor and spinning the wheels, had broken the rear axle. The tourists sat huddled under the trees, like exotic and very ripe fruit, unable to survive the heat and about to suddenly decompose into this foreign soil. Only fading pastel clothing, a sandal or two, and their rusting cameras would remain to show they ever existed here. Their hands waved the flies away from their flushed faces, and their breathing was rapid and light.

  Some of the tourists accepted Billy’s offer and crammed themselves into the back of his vehicle and under the dinghy which, roped to a high rack level with the top of the cab, provided some shifting shade. Billy drove as carefully as he could, suddenly mindful of the frailty of the pale people behind him. The hot metal stung their thin skin, their soft flesh bruised, their eyes wept with the wind and dust. It seemed their brittle bones would break, their very skeletons fall apart within them as the Toyota lurched along.

  Usually Billy and Milton distributed their catch as they came back among the houses. As they drove back through the camp Milton would tell Billy where to stop, and to whom they should give fish. It made them feel strong and generous. ‘Proper hunters, eh?’ one or the other of them would say.

  They did the same today, otherwise the fish would be wasted. But they did it hurriedly, because of their cargo of fail humanity, but also because that cargo revived itself. They remembered they were paying passengers, and they transformed themselves from cargo to consumers. They cooed at the babies, wrinkled their noses at the smells, stared into the grimy gloom within doorways and shook their heads at the rubbish and the signs of neglect. Their cameras whirred clicked flashed in accompaniment. Such black skins, such bright sun; this would mean problems with film exposure for sure. The people receiving fish kept their heads bowed, and showed no pleasure in the gifts. They mumbled and turned away. The tourists wanted to be friendly, and shouted at them, apparently hoping that they could communicate with the aliens by doing so.