Jim Kenniff walked his horse into a wind that came across the plain from the west like a blast from a furnace. Then it was dusk. Then dark and the wind turned cold and the country was empty but for a few dim lights on the southern horizon. Those lights were miles away. The night was blue. Starry and cold. He pointed his horse at the lights. He had been riding on this cooling plain, through towns and bars in towns, riding towards a place he could not name; running from a thing that occasionally in his mind took the shape of a police patrol. And he would see men on horses on the plain that fit the dream – but they were scalpers or shepherds and they rode on and left him be. He rode through the night and rode into a town like all the others.
He rode in with two cleanskin horses he had won at cards. The horses were hitched to each other with a driving rein. He would put them with his horses that were loose up in the stony country at their hideout, then take them to sale in the spring. But first he would put them in a paddock at Elim with the other horses he had won and stolen on the road. He had gone through £1200 that month – in country where the average ringer was paid £1/10 a week. He bought new boots and clothes wherever he was and then left them in hotel rooms. He sat at blackjack tables with £100 stakes; he lost £300 in a night to a drunk surgeon in a poker game on a train; and he had spent more than half his money on drink and gambling. He had a cut above his left eye from a barroom brawl where a man had hit him with a whisky bottle. He lost count of the days he had been living in hotels and camping in the wilderness. He had picked up a telegram from an outpost post office and paid a girl on the street to read it. Tom Lawton wanted to meet him outside Ilfracombe, else Augathella if he had already ridden on.
He waited on the outskirts on a hill overlooking the gaslights. He came into town at dusk like a hunted animal, skirting the edges of the world of men. Never to be welcomed.
He followed a Chinese man with a bamboo pipe slung across his back. The man went to a slat-timber smoking den festooned with red Chinese lanterns.
He smoked a pipe and the dragons carved into the joists began to coil around each other and he smiled.
A girl came beside him.
He took a coin from his pocket and spun it on the table. The coin stopped spinning so this was not a dream.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘A woman brought me here to the hospice.’ She pulled her hair to the side to show the wound not yet healed above her right eye.
‘I’ll kill the bastard.’
‘That’s been done.’
Jim laughed.
‘So you didn’t lie to me that night about being protected.’
‘I did. I was lucky this time.’
Jim nodded.
‘Well, I spose you have many … suitors.’
The girl scowled.
‘I know who you are.’
‘Because I told you.’
‘But now I truly know.’
‘How?’
‘I read the papers this morning.’
‘How do you know how to read?’
‘Nuns taught me.’
‘What do the papers say?’
She stood up and went to the Chinese proprietor of the house. He retrieved the city newspaper from under his desk.
She went back to the table and put it down in front of him. He glanced at it.
‘It’s dark in here. You read it to me.’
‘It says, “Outlaws James and Patrick Kenniff and their gang of bandits out of the Carnarvon Ranges may be abroad in the west of the state. They are wanted in relation to the theft and sale of horses from Carnarvon and Babbiloora stations and other matters of interest to the police. It has been rumoured they may be seeking ship to South Africa or California. Any knowledge as to their whereabouts will be handsomely rewarded.”’
Jim lay down on his side and lit his bamboo pipe and drew.
‘If I wanted a ship, why would I be in the desert?’
The girl smiled.
‘You going to turn me in?’ said Jim.
‘No. But I’ve never heard such a public warning over stolen horses.’ She stared at him. ‘What have you done?’
He was silent. He dragged the paper towards him. There was a bad sketch of him. It was either him or Paddy – in flight on a horse. He stared at the words beside the picture. He leant close to the page. Turned it left then right. She saw.
‘You can’t read it, can you?’
He looked up at her.
‘No.’
Though they were poor his mother had had books. She had sung songs. His sisters took after her. Later, they would read to him the letters their mother sent from Brisbane and then Sydney. He remembered one where she extolled the beauties of the latter city’s cathedral bells tolling in a manner she called ‘plain hunting’, but Jim had no notion of what that might sound like. It made him think of shooting foxes on the grass flats, and that did not sound like much. The only bells he had ever heard were fixed to horses with a wont to stray.
‘I could teach you to read. I know where I can get books of stories. Not just newspapers. Stories that tell all manner of unbelievable things. Back in Jericho I have two paper books. And the Bible. But I can get books here, too.’
He smiled.
‘Maybe tomorrow. But can you write as well as read?’
‘Yes.’
He took out a small yellowed sheet of paper and handed it to her.
‘The Chinaman will have a pen and ink.’
She went to the Chinaman’s desk and took them. She came back to the table.
‘Write, To Tom L. Meet at Tiger Scrub in seven days. If not there ride to Mexico.’
He asked her to repeat it. He put six shillings on the table on top of the paper.
‘Get the old man to take half the money and give the driver the other half and take it in secret with the next mail coach. And please get me some water.’
She gave the note and the money to the Chinaman. She took a glass and drew water from a barrel beside the back door. She came back and sat down and put the glass on the table.
‘I have one other paper that mentioned you. It called you and your brother the “wolves of the ranges”.’
He was silent. He looked down at his pipe. He took a drink of water. She looked at his tip-twisted moustache now growing into a wild beard. She stared at his green eyes. Pretty green eyes like her own. She did not know if they were wolf’s eyes.
‘You have sad eyes,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you have not done something awful. Perhaps something awful has happened to you.’ She watched him. ‘Why are you shaking?’
‘I need more smoke. Or a drink. That’s all.’
She looked at his fine coat. Oilskin with lapels.
‘Were you poor like me?’
‘Don’t the newspaper stories say?’
‘No.’
‘You ever seen those kids in the bush? Irish kids. Wearing a pinafore night and day because they have nothing else. Untaught in everything and left to themselves till the day they are useful for work. If a stranger comes to the house they hide in the bush like savages. And if their mother sees the stranger first, she gathers them into her skirts and shuts the door. Not for fear of the man, but because she knows her children aren’t fit to be seen. And you see your six-year old brother not able to say a word at night cause he’s exhausted from drivin horses all day cutting chaff. And you never ever sleep until dawn. Not even on your birthday. And twice a year troopers ride round, and you get hidden like I say, and your father hides, and your mother goes to a box and gives them what little you had for the winter for the glory of Crown and King.’
She nodded.
‘I’ve never had a birthday.’ She sighed. ‘Why don’t you and me get a place?’
‘Say again?’
‘We can go somewhere together.’
He stared at her.
‘Why me?’
She shrugged her shoulders.
‘I feel like we’re aligned.’
‘How aligned?’
She shrugged. She fell back in her chair. She touched the stitches on the wound on her forehead.
‘What would we do?’ Jim said.
‘You can change your name. Do horse work. I read you’re good at it. We can go somewhere far away from everywhere and you can break horses. We could go to the snow, where you mother’s people were from. Or further down south where it’s civilised and no one knows you. Or America if you have the money. The papers say you have the money.’
‘I’ve near blown it. Anyway, there are better men than me, girl. Station managers and such. Some lose their wives and are in want of another. You’re pretty enough. Ask one of them to take you with them.’
‘I did. Three weeks ago. He wouldn’t.’
‘What manner of man was he?’
‘A policeman.’
Jim nodded.
‘But was there never any other man?’
‘There was a British officer. He was from a good family. He put me with child.’
‘What happened?’
‘He ran off.’
‘The child?’
‘An old woman gave me burnt seeds and the child … went out of me.’
Jim closed his eyes and nodded. He was silent. The girl went on.
‘The woman sold me the seeds. But she said I was going to hell for it. I said she’d taken the money so she’d be going with me. She shouted at me from the Bible. I remember the verse she cursed me with. “Are you not children of transgression, the offspring of deceit, you who burn with lust among the oaks, under every green tree, who slaughter your children in the valleys, under the clefts of the rocks?”’
‘Bloody hell, girl. How would you remember that?’
‘How could I forget? I destroyed the image of God.’
He shook his head. She closed her eyes.
‘Am I going to hell?’
‘Why do you ask me? Because you think I’m near it?’
‘No. Only …’
‘Because I know about sin? All black women take scripture literally, girl. It’s not how it’s meant to be taken. You did no great wrong. I want another pipe.’
‘You’ve sold some horses. Risked your life to do it. For your father and brothers? But you drink and smoke your share in houses like this. Drink and gamble it away.’
‘Did you read all that?’
‘Yes. And I see it.’
‘So why take up with me now? What good am I?’
She moved to beside him. She put her head on his shoulder. Her hand on his thigh.
But he was no good for that now. The smoke had killed it. He fell asleep in the chair.