From out of the dust storm the Fishman drove home.
A long line of battered old cars heavily coated in the red-earth dust of the dry country crawled wearily behind him, leaving in their wake a haze of petrol fumes and dust. The red ochre spectacle belonged to Big Mozzie Fishman’s never-ending travelling cavalcade of religious zealots, which once again was heading home, bringing a major Law ceremony over the State border.
Bearers of the feared secret Law ceremony, these one hundred men were holy pilgrims of the Aboriginal world. Their convoy continued an ancient religious crusade along the spiritual travelling road of the great ancestor, whose journey continues to span the entire continent and is older than time itself. They come and go, surrounded in a red cloud of mystery, travelling along roads where the only sound is the ghostly intermittent chime of a single distant bell, ringing out of the ground, echoing throughout the bushland.
The long dusty convoy, passing through the pristine environment of the northern interior, seemed to have risen out of the earth. There it goes. A simple other-worldly in appearance crusade, that looked as though it belonged to some enchanted agelessness touched by a holy hand.
In the thirty-car procession, moving, eating, sleeping, living in second-hand Falcon sedans and Holden station wagons of 1980s vintage, travelled men of every adult age were covered with days and months of dust. They breathed so close to the earth, the night might have mistaken them for the spirits of the dead. On the spiritual road, which was indeed hard and bumpy, the life of these vehicles had been refashioned many times over. In an astonishing modern-day miracle of recycling by those spiritual men of Fishman’s convoy who had artisan hands and the minds of genius, using tools and parts found only in nature, all of these vehicles survived over thousands of kilometres of the country’s hardest rock and gravel.
Aboriginal folk living along the back roads spoke in whispers about how they had encountered the half spirits – Men, bedraggled. They hid from the dirt-encrusted cars with the Australian flag flying from radio aerials all along the convoy. It would be difficult to dispute that the journey undertaken by the Fishman’s convoy was as pure as the water birds of the Wet season’s Gulf country lagoons flying overhead, travelling through sky routes of ageless eons to their eternal, ancient homes. It was this sound they heard one day, coming their way, and bush folks called it the breath of the earth.
The clear day into which Mozzie Fishman’s convoy travelled was so different to yesterday on the southern edge of the Gulf of Carpentaria when a dust storm suddenly appeared in the plains country. It rolled down from the skies, darkening the land, howling like dead people in the night, and swallowed up the weight in the heavy minds of these spiritual travellers while they slept with backs against the wind, so they could be released from the bond of months, even years, on the road, dedicated to religious duty. This was the story for the journey passing through this part of the country. No one in the convoy had been surprised; the dust storm was expected to appear before they reached home.
The convoy crested spinifex-covered hills, dipped into red rock valleys, curved round the narrow bends, and created a long snake of red dust in its wake. Ahead, the road, a wound cut in the country, was as clear as a day could be for Big Mozzie, who was so happy country and western melodies sprang into his mind from a buried heyday, jumping from his soul out to the world through his steel-grey beard. Listen! He was singing his favourite songs in a full voice, loud and infectious, on the north wind travelling back down the convoy, everyone laughing. The landscape passed by in a yellow-green and red blur of enchanted spirits listening to the riotous choir of yippee yi-ays heading for Desperance, home of the country and western big man, fitted like a stuffed black glove in the bucket seat beside the driver of the leading car.
Not everyone on earth knew how the religious leader acquired a name like Mozzie. Some small thing that happened sixty years ago when he was born into this world can become the hardest thing to remember. His childhood was of times when big secrets grew in families. Nor did everyone know that once upon a time, his name might have been Paul, or something Old Testament like Joshua, for it was never said. It was best to remain prudent and not invite common talk about a cultural man like Mozzie. The Pricklebushers never asked how people acquired names. Instead, they preferred the jargon of deference, talking in sentences, like, Nobody remembers any old jingalo trivia about names anymore around here.
Gasbagging talk was what other people did behind your back, whispering if they liked – for it was a free country. This is why the world never fails to astonish, no matter where people live, for there will always be some who sink so deep into the valley of dishonourable pursuits, and chatter amongst themselves about the humble beginnings of the religious and holy, like Mozzie Fishman. One poor old limpy woman and one ageing crippled-up leg of a man, who by chance of miracle, lived into modern times. So what if they had conceived a son at their age? This was what people do, they were in love; there could have been worse freaks of nature. Ten thousand fish still swam in the bay and as many birds still flew in the skies.
If it was not enough for gossip to fall like the blow of a heavy piece of lead, straight on the heads of this one poor, elderly couple, but they soon had more bad humbug to bother them. They were ruthlessly urged to move their sparse household, a dozen times a day. People were complaining endlessly about the old couple with the troublesome son who was causing half the mischief and running about, they claimed, wherever he pleased. Justice was nothing. They appealed, but seeing there was no use in talking, they would end up talking less and less, and in the end, what happened? Well! They were squatting like a pair of dogs sheltering under one prickle bush to the next, in little yaji nests, and going about bewildered, cowering from one nothing place to another. ‘Shameful and a thousand curses too,’ the old couple complained to the big walakuku humpy people. This was only muttered behind their backs, but the embittered community heard and cursed back. Go away you people! They called out to Mozzie and his elderly parents. Go! You are too much more spreading diseases, if you please.
Those were the days of people rushing around mad with too many modern ideas which did not belong in their heads. Strange things were said by the maranguji doctors about the boy’s blood being full of boiled lollies. Some people, women in particular, who were blood relatives to the maranguji men and women, spoke of collision theories which they had formulated over a quarter of a century of card game talk. These women spoke of what happened to people if you had seven decades of accumulated sugar racing around in your body – like what had happened to the old couple. You could feel the irritability in the air by the way they flapped the cards, feeling the old couple must still be around somewhere, still there some place, and would have to go. Their impatience was the normal way people of the modern world of the white man went about their business, the general attitude to your fellow mankind’s acts of intolerance. Afterwards, complaining of the others who had participated in that marathon gambling and talkback event, they whinged, Their mumbling and grumbling made you sick. It was no wonder why the spirit of the country was raw with unkindness.
The harmless parents of Mozzie Fishman moved obligingly, repeatedly, only mentioning from time to time, ‘It was no good being so persistently nomadic in modern times for you cannot keep up with people, always jumping about the place.’ No truer word was spoken because jumpiness creates a tidal wave of problems. You have no place to call home: nowhere to send the mail. Nomadism was no longer the answer.
Wherever the old couple’s boy was seen to be in those miserable days of unkindness, the spies in the Pricklebush swore that they had seen black clouds of mosquitos swarming in his wake. Wherever the boy walked, the Pricklebush resonated with the irritating sounds made by these unusual swarms as they moved around in the air. The boy had to walk somewhere. So, everyone got the chance to see the phenomenon.
Mozzie Fishman grew out of his childhood affliction, and not a single mosquito followed him around anymore. He proudly claimed that he was conditioned by his parents to be ready to move for the benefit of other people.
Such tales were alluvium, pay dirt to the Roy Orbison sunglass-wearers who often travelled by nightfall like so many bats, with the windows of their cars wound up, so the devil-devil spirits of mosquitos could not get in and inject them with the dreaded encephalitis disease. Aborigine people were different now, they knew the scientify as well, like the sophisticated naming of what mosquitos carried around in their little bodies. And if mosquitos were bad, the devotees of Mozzie’s convoy would get the Mortein Plus out, like the television advertisement, and hit them hard between the eyes.
The spiritual Dreaming track of the ceremony in which they were all involved, moved along the most isolated back roads, across the landscape, through almost every desert in the continent. The convoy, which had grown with cars of all colours and descriptions, kept a wide berth from the gawking eyes of white people’s towns, Fishman called them, ‘those who just wouldn’t know even if you gave them something on a stick.’
The men in this moving mirage of battered vehicles felt they had well and truly followed the Dreaming. Travel had become same, same and mandatory, as the convoy moved in reptile silence over the tracks of the travelling mighty ancestor whom they worshipped through singing the story that had continued for years. The crossing of the continent to bring the ceremony north-east to the Gulf, to finish it up, was a rigorous Law, laid down piece by piece in a book of another kind covering thousands of kilometres.
‘Start em up again!’ The Fishman’s voice would ring out each morning. The men would rise from the face of the world where they slept like lizards, dreaming the essence of a spiritual renewal rotating around the earth, perhaps in clouds of stars like the Milky Way, or fog hugging the ground as it moved across every watercourse in the continent before sunrise. The convoy journeys were a slower orbit of petrol-driven vehicles travelling those thousands of kilometres each year. The pilgrims drove the roads knowing they had one aim in life. They were totally responsible for keeping the one Law strong by performing this one ceremony from thousands of creation stories for the guardians of Gondwanaland.
The feared ceremony crossed the lost dusty roads of ancient times, running across one another like vermicelli, passing through many empty communities. People in these isolated communities had simply gathered up all their sounds and left silence in their wake. The high degree of secrecy and sacredness surrounding the convoy extended in an invisible radius beaming hundreds of miles in every direction. Only an idiot would ask about it. Only a stupid person would stand in the way of the approaching convoy. Unless, they wanted to end up being drawn into the whole realm of this sacred business, for once absorbed by the snake lizard moving along the roads following the path of the great ancestor, you were hit with a ton of responsibilities that common people could not even dream about. Whole communities of hundreds of people living anywhere ahead of the convoy ran straight for the bush when they heard via the two-way radio, the morse code warning that the convoy was getting closer. Must be nobody going to live here anymore.
People quickly came down from the skies where they were walking the tightrope of existence and armed themselves with rifles for protection against the zealot mob. Women and kids who were not allowed to see anything of the convoy on the road headed straight to the sand hills or ran into dense mulga scrub – covering up all tracks behind them. This was where everyone sat quiet as a marsupial mouse not doing a single anything, just whispering, that’s all, until word came at last that it was safe to return home. Not all men or all older boys wanted to be dragged away into a religious pilgrimage that would heave them far from their homelands for endless months, maybe even years.
As time went by, hundreds of sick people would have waited on the hot, parched road for the Fishman to come and take them away. They were the ones who said they had thought they were going through life for what it was and then, all of a sudden, some other terrible thing happened, and their life would never be the same again. Fishman would pick them up and they would go on pilgrimage to the ancestral resting places, until the end came. Fishman treated sick people with reverence. They had his respect and he buried those who died properly, in a sacred resting place. Why? Fishman explained he helped his people because there was no good whitefella government governing for blackpella people anywhere. And the sick pleaded to go with him.
When Fishman came across the sick people waiting beside the red dust blowing dead spinifex balls up the road, he would stand for a long time on the outskirts, just looking at their ailing communities as though he was expecting the people hiding in the bush to come back. The pilgrims would stand around their cars watching the wind blowing past the empty houses – studying the lives of ordinary people. The young men tapped their car roofs to the tune of I got you babe, all eager to move on, as soon as the petrol supplies were replenished. It was on these occasions, so close to the empty communities of fellow countrymen, that the Fishman felt a much stranger, frightening sensation of what was left of his own humanity. These times when he stared into space were the times when he talked to himself.
Mozzie saw visions when he drifted off with the hot temperatures or the silence and began speaking to himself. The men would overhear him saying things like ‘The skies have become a sea of hands.’ ‘There are too many, everything moving too fast and thick like a nest of worms twisting, hands turning, convulsing hands, attacking the place like missiles.’ Nobody claimed they ever saw what the Fishman was watching, while looking where he looked, following his eyes glinting in the sun. Some old wise men moved closer behind the Fishman in case, they said, ‘We might capture his line of vision.’ They were determined people the old wise men. There was also a lot of nervousness in the convoy. But the more inquisitive wanted to know what he saw. So, Fishman explained. He said it was hard to keep up with all the hands sliding everywhere, created by a special luminance caught in the fractures of light. He described how he saw hands touching everything in the community. ‘Hands too many,’ he whispered, coughing, ‘running like mice all over every dwelling, trying to reshape, push, mould, trying to make things different. White hands.’
Must be how they would like it, hey? What do you think? Mozzie always had someone available to give a little back-up commentary.
The old wise men were astounded by the vision of white hands. Perhaps it was presumptuous for them to assume they ought to be black hands of black people when most other people believe the colour of spirits is white.
Fishman would be taken over by these visions, and would speak out very loudly, as though they were all witnessing the monumental event, like they had all been thrust into the front line of a war zone where the attack he was witnessing was deafening, and he would be shouting out the bits and pieces of information: ‘See this, see that.’ It was as though he could not hear himself speak. And Fishman? He cringed, lowering himself, and stepping back, arms wide, as if he were trying to keep everyone safe and out of the line of attack. He never liked what he saw in the visions because it was too frightening, he said. Sometimes he saw thousands of these hands at work. He could see them killing Aboriginal people. He believed the hands belonged to all kinds of white people, some dead, some still alive, and he knew because he was able to recognise hands, that some of those hands belonged to people who were still living and still sitting themselves on top of traditional Law.
‘You know what?’ Fishman asked, as he did, before explaining what he saw.
‘No!’
‘Their unconscious thoughts have been arrested in a limbo of unresolved issues which must be preventing their entire spirits from entering the afterworld. Their hands and thoughts have been left behind. They are locked up in their own injustice.’
These were the kinds of visions which made the Fishman decide on new rules. His number one rule was that the convoy was never to enter a community together. He of course never went into a community while on the road. Only a few were allowed to go into a community if the purpose served the convoy.
Frequently after his visions, Mozzie would complain of chest pains that only affected him in these empty human places. His followers would begin moving him back to his car, sighing to each other in relief as the other vehicles returned from the community, and the senior men ordered the convoy to move on. Then, turning to whatever ailing people were waiting on the roadside, Fishman would say, ‘Come with me and be released from the cages of poverty.’
On the road, Fishman picked up anybody, even if there was no room left in any of the vehicles. ‘Get out and walk,’ he emptied cars of young men. ‘Make do,’ he ordered others. ‘Catch us up.’ Fishman’s visions did not die with the distance placed between him and his men. In the following days on the road the pilgrims drove while listening to the crying of the frightened voices of the sick people, pleading not to be taken to a whitefella hospital where they would be treated rough, like they were strangers: ‘We are not taking you there, we are not going to.’ It was hard to build trust.
More times than not, the convoy would stay clear of communities they passed on the roads, because visiting was too stressful, particularly on the old people who would dream about what they had seen for days afterwards, about how they saw a whole industry of invisible hands at work on those places. By staying away from them, they felt they had won a battle because this was what Mozzie told them. His voice winning down the roads – winning he claimed, over the cold and heartless ambitions of politicians and bureaucrats who came flying in from faraway cities and capitals to destroy the lives of Aboriginal people.
They say, people in the right circles – academic people, who use their brains to talk about such things as cult movements – that there are not many religious zealots as big as the Fishman in the Aborigine people’s world of today. It might be true. He might be too big, or it might be equally true to say that his reputation was more dazzling and more amazing than the actual man.
Norm Phantom, a close friend of Mozzie Fishman, who was himself a big man of the contemporary times, said quite plainly he never wanted to have any part of his friend’s convoys. He said Mozzie got on his nerves. Everyone knew in the Pricklebush camps that Norm Phantom was a follower of spirits out in the sea. The Fishman, on the other hand, was a failure as a water man. Two minutes on a boat and he would be hanging over the side. But Norm could not deny Fishman his unbeaten title of water divining. The men travelling with the Fishman saw this miracle every day. He would get out of his car, sniff, and, without fail, detect in the dry air the moist smell of water coming out of wet ground and plants a hundred kilometres away, or of a hidden soakage in the flat spinifex plains. ‘He never used a forked stick either,’ the Fishman’s followers bragged in the Pricklebush contest of whose extraordinary gifts were bigger and greater, but it could have been that he simply knew the country that’s all, like the back of his hand.
‘Fishman is the most uncommonly uncommon person walking alive today.’
‘So he only used his nose then?’
‘Yes.’
‘Big nose like Pinocchio?’
‘No, not like Pinocchio.’
‘Well! How does he do it?’
‘He just sniff the air like an animal.’
Everyone had a story to tell of the Fishman this and that. But it was not all glamour on the religious road. He extracted a big price for his pilgrimages into the redneck country of small towns and vast cattlemen acreages where he and his whole shebang were considered an affront to white decency. Pure white nanny-goats running down the dry riverbeds and phone callers echoing to each other: Can you see what I see? Dead keen to excite each other up, those isolated white folk, any stranger to the entire continent would have thought Mozzie’s convoy carried a huge deadly chimera of a virus from the third world. Oh! Joyless one day life turned out to be in the openness of the cattleman’s kingdom, when a blot of strange-looking blacks appeared like an eyesore on the horizon. Who knew why there were boongs squatting down on the riverbank? the maddened men announced as they did what they normally did: defended their boggle-eyed kin with rifle fire. This was why Mozzie Fishman knew he could not stay with the white people teaching them about reconciliation, and moved the convoy on. He never saw himself as a target and would never get used to the idea of being used as target practice either.
All the little country towns, dotted here and there on the back roads, hated the sight of Fishman’s convoy in the main street: dirty people and whatnot. The words about dirty people and whatnot, which travelled like wildfire, spread down the bush telegraph: Of seeing them hordes of blacks on the road again. The story did not go away like in the newspapers where yesterday’s story was old news. The what was likely to happen, a question of huge proportions and consequences, grew up into big talk, which must be big talk when town people were talking about killing the black hordes.
So, there was no bringing out a Red Roses box of Australian chocolates to share around but instead, there were gawking people wherever there were shabby cars full of black men filing into a town. All we want to do, the residents chimed to each other behind locked doors in a mighty big hurry, is to guard the decency of clean-living people. They had a respectable place and there were Aboriginals travelling foot to mouth. Worse than even...? What? A bandwagon full of politicians. Why don’t you go out and blow up the roads when you see people like that coming here? Those tiny town shires spoke hard logic when sunshine was threatened.
No, Mozzie’s life on the road was not easy and back home at Desperance, he was expected to return.
As soon as a fair breeze blew in from the south, going straight through the Pricklebush and out over the coast to converge with the seasonal change of the Wet, there would be someone with an acute sense of smelling no one else had, who might say they could smell trouble coming up the road. How could that be? There was no reason. It might turn out to be true or it might be some people were born liars. Trust nobody was the motto.
Pricklebush waited instead for the red wall. This happened when the breeze picked up and turned into a wall of red dust spanning from left to right across the southern horizon, visible up to twenty miles away from Desperance. Then they really knew Fishman was coming home. The red wind ran through their homes and the specks of dust gathered from Mozzie’s convoy hit people right in the eyes.
Days like this stayed around like a rot, and every day the wind would start up again, as soon as the clock said eleven. The wind blew and blew until six p.m. and people with sandy blight in their eyes jumped with relief, as soon as the wind stopped. But still, no one would admit Mozzie was on his way, until one day, a red-ring-eyed person, some pea-brain person, for every creed and race has got them – an Eastside person – would start to make trouble. You ask yourself, What’s that noise? And it would sound like a stick being dragged along the ground. And it was a stick. The stupid person was dragging a stick around the ground, making little noughts and crosses, in a full lull of boredom on a sunny afternoon, perhaps, Sunday! When, without thinking about it, this person who you had been watching and just turned your back on what they were doing for a second, had gone and written the name Mozzie Fishman in the dirt and walked away, leaving the name in the ground behind them.
It was too late to run over and rub away what was done. What’s that? Some old person who could read English came along and stopped, shocked. He stared down at the ground mind you, and could not believe his eyes. Mozzie Fishman’s name written in the dirt. Soon the old person would be screaming – Come out the stupid person who wrote that man’s name in the ground, who got to have a sound slap over the head, and then he would scrub the name out with his feet before walking on. But it was far, far too late by then. The deed was done.
Ever since Mozzie set off down the south road on his first convoy, there had been many times when the Pricklebush people thought they had said their final farewell. We hopes he never comes back, the poor old skinny people said wholeheartedly as they waved goodbye. They were jack of him causing trouble with Uptown. He was like a dumped cat, always coming back, always claiming the people who had thrown him away.
They said they only had themselves to blame for causing their own bad luck. Awful days passed waiting for the conjurer to evoke himself into Desperance. The build-up in people’s minds was as though some spell had been cast over their brains. Up and down the Pricklebush people went, chucking around their suspicions about each other and casting aspersions around hilly-pilly with their hostile staring about what other people might be thinking, and cutting up the air into thin little ribbons. Silly people tried to excuse themselves by saying, Oh! Jesus Christ I never meant to be bad. But it was too late, You idiot. The change was on the way and one day, materialising out of thin air, Mozzie Fishman would be amongst them again.
‘You forget your troubles easily,’ Norm Phantom was forever trying to defuse the obsession created by Mozzie’s visits. He often went fishing, sat in a becalmed sea, just to get away from the talk about whether Mozzie was doing this or was doing that. Calmer people often tried to persuade Mozzie to act normally when he was in Desperance – to stop his outlandish behaviour.
‘You want to stop running around town like a white man,’ Norm told Mozzie.
‘But brother, it seems to me you accuse any black man in town of being a coconut. I seduce Uptown. I get them to eat out of my hands.’
Mozzie was a wizard or some kind of magic man with a cauldron of tricks brewing inside his body. Many, many Pricklebush people went up to Uptown and cautioned him, Be quiet about white people. He paid you no attention. You don’t go and tell white people anything. Not the police especially. But no, he went right ahead walking around town saying he was like nuclei. Did anyone knows what was nuclei? No. People in the Pricklebush talked about killing Mozzie.
‘Well!’ He explained in wild talk, his cigarette bobbing up and down in the corner of his mouth, saying how, ‘Everyone had to go through me. Everyone had to because they were like negatives on a roll of film and nobody could see their picture.’ He said when he joined the negatives up with the great spirits they would turn positive, instantly like a polaroid photo. The people of Uptown were convinced something was happening when they listened to Mozzie’s speeches, because they said they felt the heat of fire burning the side of their faces.
Mozzie claimed he had the power to cause an enormous nuclear fusion which nobody on this earth had ever seen before, and goodness knows what will happen next. Whenever he spoke, using his grandiose words, he would lead people into agreeing how he could have been a great President or a Prime Minister in another life – if he had not been born in the Pricklebush. The policeman just stood there listening to Mozzie talk while his baby-blue eyes almost popped out of his head. Even with full uniform on and a cap on his head it was a waste of money paid for the power of authority. Nobody was in charge. When the policeman came down to the Pricklebush to see what Big Mozzie was up to, Mozzie told him the story about nuclei. He had the nerve to call out that story to the police, while knowing full well the law was being aided and abetted by all the governments in the whole country – state government, local government, government calling themselves Aboriginal Affairs, or whatever else coming from Canberra, because who knows by what Act of Law the white man calls himself in his many disguises. All the friends of the law were standing well behind Truthful while he was being set upon by Mozzie. They were hissing this and that advice, while being forced to breathe in Big Mozzie’s words like they were poisonous fumes of loose radicals: carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, carbon tetrachloride.
All those poor Uptown people who did not know any better were really frightened of Mozzie. We know all about fallout, Mozzie Fishman, someone shouted at him, even though people in the Pricklebush who were watching knew the speaker did not know what he was talking about. They never knew where Mozzie Fishman had been, disappearing and reappearing into their lives. They thought he must have been living in a nuclear dump if he said he was nuclei. But apart from what was happening in Mozzie’s life, everybody knew one thing, people had a good right to be frightened about breathing nuclear air and Mozzie should not have brought his radioactive body into the Pricklebush.
It was things like this which were the last straw. Uptown people started running around telling tales, until the whole town was jumping around about Mozzie Fishman making bombs. Soon enough, everyone had an expectation rattling in their minds. With a major explosion in sight, old people had their eyes trained on Uptown with spyglasses from the Pricklebush. Look who was who ordering the law and order around. Reading lip talk, they said to interested spectators what people were saying Uptown. They said, Get him out of here, get him out, he’s a bloody troublemaker. Nobody could believe their ears, and said they did not think it was that bad, listening to the telephone wire twang in panic for hours between Desperance, and down South. The children, who were used to dangling themselves along the wire, said it was the line that was hot, that even the mad crows flew off in fright with smoking feet dangling below in midair. No one knew what the earth was being talked about that stopped the night owl from trying to go hoot! de! hoot! at two or three o’clock in the morning. It was such an uppity town sometimes.
People united like never before to confront the Fishman with their shiny rifles aiming right at his fat belly button, which looked like a good target, but he told them to forget it. He stared at them with hard eyes. The look he had on his face had not been seen in the Pricklebush for many generations. He said if anyone got two foot in his way, he would explode like the bloated carcass of a bullock someone had run over, and when that happened he would be more or less obliged to spill his guts right into their faces.
All he had to do was sneeze he said. ‘Yes, just sneeze.’ Such audacity. And the crowd, standing too long on Uptown’s hot bitumen road, hallucinated how they would all die one terrible death of suffocation in the rotten stench of Fishman’s exploded guts. Only the men on the convoy knew the harmless sound of his cough. A sound, similar to the faulty carburettors of their vehicles, came from deep inside his throat all day long. ‘Look out for unseasonable dust storms,’ he warned as the riflemen began retreating, heading instead to the rifle range out of town, ‘It will make everyone sneeze.’ Before they could move very far, he gave one sharp clap, and their twitchy fingers closed on triggers, with a volley of shots reverberating overhead.
When everything calmed down, and he had their full attention again, Fishman said the sound he had just made was the sound of instantaneous death. ‘That was all they would hear,’ he explained with an honest-felt melancholy in his voice which made their eyes twitch faster. Perhaps Uptown already knew that the sound of death sounded like a sharp clap of the hand. ‘You will die one day,’ the policeman warned, wagging his finger at Mozzie. ‘You will know,’ Mozzie repeated, with a mocking sputter of spit, a little choking, and then silence. Only his cigarette continued to glow and burn on his Clint Eastwood face, whenever he inhaled its fumes into his lungs.
The trouble was Mozzie Fishman was from a different dimension to other people who had to get on with their lives. Fishman should have known too: nobody should lose respect for people who had to get along with others for the peacefulness of the situation. But, that was too good for Mozzie, he decided he would stay in, or return to his own particular time warp, unable to get it out of his system. The art of compromise was too good for him – to get on with life. No, he lived solid to the past, to relive it all when he came home like a curse. Neither would it take him long to drive everyone else back into the past with him – two minutes of plethora to reorient Pricklebush lives into the past was the record so far. Two minutes back, and off he would go, harping on the piece of bitumen in Uptown about the time when the mining venture was first established twenty years ago on his grand-daddy’s traditional land. This was not the big, multinational mining company which came recently, but an old prospector he was talking about, digging gravel with a shovel.
The very next thing which would happen, he would come marching around, like in one of them old street marches – a demonstration, and people who were just out shopping for the day, would look and say, What is this? Nobody knew what was happening, or what caused it, since he was acting like twenty years ago was only yesterday when there had been so much water under the bridge for everyone else. Kids grown up. Grandchildren on the lap. Mozzie was oblivious to all that. He continued marching along, left – right, left – right, stirring up the possum’s nest, bringing all those painful memories pouring back, if anyone could remember so far back in time.
The old skinny Westside mob who went out with their spyglasses, peeping through the thorny bush hideouts and in unison tut-tutting, said: Boy! We wish he would just piss off. Insidious nightmare. Et cetera.
Well! Nobody thought it was a joking matter because his talking caused talk everywhere, big talk, all over the country. Oh! Imagine how people felt when they turned on the radio and the television even, and there he was, speaking: talking on the radio about the mine. Even the television had his big face on it. Well! Big talk caused no sense but trouble which came along in full force. All the police flew into Desperance on an aeroplane for the day to pick up Mozzie Fishman, manhandled him forcefully to the edge of town, and chucked him out like he was nothing.
If he was not enough nuisance there was more bad talk like nobody had ever witnessed, coming out of the fat lips of the Queen of Sheba herself. She, Angel Day, had eyes all over the place, even though she was still married to Norm Phantom then. A lot of people said they saw the wickedness of the devil’s face when she smiled although none had the courage to tell her to her face. Old Mona Lisa would have looked like a sour lemon beside Angel Day on the rare days she put a smile on her dial, laughing with her friends when some new man was in town. The old women yelled out to those hussies, Haven’t you got a kitchen to attend to instead of sitting around ponging like backstreet alley cats? Dressed all hoity-toity. Angel and her friends laughingly yelled back, Well! Old women you would know about what goes on in the backstreets. The old women knew what was being said as they waltzed around each other’s homes in the Pricklebush, whispering among themselves and listening to their rot.
‘He was like an opal,’ Angel purred through red-lipstick lips about Mozzie Fishman to her other moonstruck friends.
‘No! He’s not. He is like a really bright sapphire shining through the night.’
‘How come he be like a sapphire when the biggest diamond in the entire world was what he was like?’
‘He like topaz too because his very skin look like warm, delicious, golden trickle of topaz.’
‘Sister, that’s not at all what he’s like. He was for sure all of the precious stones, opal, sapphire, diamond, topaz, all rolled into one.’
Perhaps it was the time of year when Mozzie returned to Desperance, which coincided with heavy doses of pheromones in the air with the Wet. They held open their hands to show a small innocuous looking insect. It was, they said, the secretions of this insect which caused younger women to become downright obsequious, although the unctuous charms of Mozzie Fishman were known across the continent, and perhaps he had an unhallowed relationship with all the insects of the earth. To those who could speak of moments in life shared intimately with another, if briefly (who could ask for more?), he shone. It was word of mouth which created this jewel of the imagination with its refracting beams of light so intoxicating for the female eye, swelling with unrequited emotional longing for the experience of the celebrated shared moment, more or less. Mozzie believed he tried no harder than other men to have women love him, but for some extraordinary reason, he was unable to deny that he was a beacon of light in the fog of men, flickering brighter than any other sojourner to Desperance, loitering in the Pricklebush of religious and political fanatics, evangelists, bigots, shamans, philistines, and passing-by self-appointed gurus.
Angel’s philandering did not stop the petulant Norm Phantom and Big Mozzie from being the best of friends. All the confused mummies told their children that both Uncles were the brightest shining stars flown in from the night sky for the people of earth. Stories, stories, the truth became so blurred, except the owl with big eyes saw everything in the night: all sorts of people were visiting each other, whenever they got half the chance. But who was anybody to butt in and dispute anything a big woman wanted to tell her children? The world would be a very sad place, little children would be lost, if they could not believe in the fantasy of a mother’s story.
Whereas Big Mozzie with the Clint Eastwood face was nothing but a bag of bones standing tall in an ancient pair of dusty R.M. Williams boots, Norm Phantom was physically and intellectually the bigger man. Their friendship grew out of Big Mozzie’s drive over those other competing religious freaks who turned up regularly to the Phantom household with their fugitive attempts to exorcise the demon, or the snake spirit, whatever it was, living beneath Angel’s house.
The Phantom house took regular forays into other-worldly matters. There had been moments of magic, precise times of exorcism, countless days of solemn prayers and undying reverence. A Catholic priest, Father Danny, drove into the Gulf one year and in the back of his car he had one thousand little crucifixes which were erected all through the house, and around it outside, and he left them there for a month. The biggest discovery the priest made was that the Phantom family were the clumsiest people alive. They knocked the crosses over whenever they moved, and the priest observed that not one member of the family was able to walk in a straight line. ‘Tell him to get this stuff out of here,’ Norm told Angel who had insisted on these matters. She told the priest to take the obstacle course away, and blamed Norm when the exorcism never worked.
Then she got a guru man to start hanging around. It was a mystery in the Pricklebush how she managed to find these people who kept turning up at her door. Everyone watched as the blond-haired guru seemed to slide around like an angel in white gowns over at the Phantoms’ place. He left out a piece of bread for the devil every day for months, bashing a drum and chanting, sometimes up to eighteen hours a day. Norm’s family did not like that either. The kids ate the bread before the spirit had a chance to get to it. At night, under the guru’s instructions, Angel made all her children go outside and beat the ground with sticks, without fail, whatever. Nothing worked. The only result was that the lurking spirit bestowed generously on all of the religious visitors a strange will to hang about, wearing out their welcome, until Norm had them evicted. All of the fanciful and fanatical became driven with obsessions like those that kept driving Mozzie Fishman, kept him dreaming of coming home to Desperance alive, to be shackled to her skirts, and to plead to be freed.
This was until one day, even with his strong connection to the spirit world under Norm’s house, his neediness for acceptance by Norm, his passionate heart for Norm’s Angel who caused only calamity for devoted men, when who would have thought Mozzie’s heart would be broken – Well it was! Whoosh! out the door. So much came unstuck from a heart torn to shreds. She said her piece to Norm like a whirly wind whistling across the flat, everything flying in sight, smack! smack! then she was gone. A middle-aged woman, run off with a…
Mozzie told Norm he could barely conjure up the vision, it was so disgusting, how a woman so magnificent in every way, who spun gold from the rubbish dump, could have stooped so low. To take up honky-tonking probably in the animal bar, who knows where, run off, with a thing, worse than any useless thing he could think of, not even a white man, but a fake. Not just one of those New-Age self-styled guru people who came looking to exorcise her demon. It was sorrowful. The so-called winner, a common black man, a coconut, even had the audacity to call himself, Uncle Tom. So additionally, he said of those times, what he had in common with Norm Phantom was shared devastation, although it was truer to say, Norm Phantom never lost a moment of his time to her memory. When she left he told the kids she had run away with a money spider.
‘What for?’
‘To chase the spider.’
‘Did you run after her?’
‘Sure, I did.’
‘Where did she go?’
‘A house full of spiders.’
There were lies in the Pricklebush and life was a mess when two of the biggest men around had been jilted for a gladbag full of whatever had drifted into everyone’s lives from the global winds of the world’s religions – Apache, Hindu, Buddhist, Jew, doesn’t matter what else. Five minutes worth of each, the wise men said. The old women wept for the man with no shame, running for grog, the white man’s piss they fed by the bucketful to poison the Pricklebush folk. They said nothing about Angel. It was the modern man’s dream of the Mona Lisa clawing at his heart which caused Big Mozzie to cry like a baby over many hundred kilometres of road.
The novices plucked like desert flowers to be taken aboard the motorcade community initially found the name to be highly deceptive. They had difficulty with the idea that nothing in Big Mozzie Fishman’s world was how it appeared. Big Mozzie growled at the newcomers and told them he was not connected with anything to do with fish – ‘No, siree.’ Lesson number one. Any debutees in his following who took it for granted that their spiritual leader would bring forth fish for the hungry wherever fish could not be found, discovered pretty quickly that was simply dead wrong, and being wrong would not do at all in Big Mozzie’s eyes. A thing done wrong was the right key to wind up the boss.
‘Biblical stories lived in somebody else’s desert,’ he would start up and talk on in a monologue with his long grey beard bobbing up and down, mesmerising every one in sight, as he talked throughout the day, if the mood for talking up big took a hold of him. Big Mozzie was at pains to make it clear that eons of indoctrination heaped onto the hapless by bible-bashers were the scourge of the blackfella’s earth. He said he believed Christian beliefs had indoctrinated Aboriginal communities like grog and it was true to say it was even the cause of grog. So, grog and other people’s religions would never do, never on the big Dreaming track. ‘Never, never will do,’ he explained. ‘Biblical stories about baskets of fishes and loaves of bread belonged to the Jewish people or some other people,’ he said, with the often-seen pleased look on his face of hardly believing his intuitiveness for hunting out the true nature of things. Time and again things happened on the road, he explained, saying that debutees must make a clean slate in their mixed-up little minds, on their hands and knees and using their own face for a rag. Big Mozzie Fishman said not to ask him about fish because he couldn’t give a dead dog’s eye about fishing, in fact, he hated fish, preferring to eat freshly hunted bush meat which the debutees had to produce for him on a daily basis, until it was proven beyond doubt that they had become true devotees.
This morning, everyone was talking about going fishing. ‘Why do they do it?’ Fishman asked with loathing and muttered a string of undecipherables into his beard. By the time the glorious sunrise grew into a hot day, he was still pouring out a venomous lecture to the people travelling in the number one vehicle of how he hated people taking it for granted that he would catch fish for them.
He spent the entire day conducting a monologue of his thoughts, speaking how he would be hard-pushed to remember the last time he had ever eaten a bit of turtle meat. ‘Stop the bloody car,’ he ordered a dozen times at least throughout the day, bringing the entire convoy to a standstill again, so he could walk down to another car and give the occupants a mouthful of his mind. ‘I should kick the whole flaming lot of you out of the convoy and just go by myself in future.’
The day was a heatwave, and the zealots, covered in sweaty dust from head to foot, were all jammed up against each other like tins of oily sardines. The dust flew through the car windows and stayed trapped inside the vehicles, swirling around in little whirly winds of country dreams. Well! Breathing dust all day clogs up the lungs, and all the vehicles were full of men with heaving coughs, or sweating skins, shaken up and down from travelling every inch of corrugation of outback roads.
Each vehicle managed to motor on, while dirty oil spluttered over overheated engines, and exhaust pipes laid about in the dirt several thousand kilometres behind. The motors were pieces of modern art held together with rusty wire and leather belts or whatever it took to keep the cars on the road. The drivers were cherished by the convoy for their expert motor mechanic skills learnt on the road. None had never shopped at the service station for the Hi Tech Carburettor, or the Fast and Efficient Brake Service, or spent time playing around with the state of the art equipment at Correct It Clutch Repairs. Nor had they ever seen the full range of spare parts and accessories for the cars they were driving, or knew what the Beaurepaires salesman sold for a living. But out on a lonely dusty road of the never never, Mozzie’s bush mechanics would have picked up enough man-made rubbish to fancy-dress a car, or do a complete engine rebuild, gearbox overhaul, the upholstery and welding done to suit.
In the middle of the day, the vehicles were travelling along a narrow, hilly road, twisting like a goat track out of Mozzie’s fishing nightmares. This stretch of road always caused Big Mozzie to break into nervous singing with a great deal of soul to the spirits. ‘Goodbye Joe, me got to go, me oh! myo! me got to go for the codfish ladies down the Bayou.’ Seriously, he told Will Phantom, a young man in his mid-twenties, who was travelling in the same car right next to Big Mozzie as his driver, he was a living expert on every Hank Williams song known to mankind. Older convoy members pretended this was true. It saved the peace. However, they knew, he knew, he never remembered the lyrics of any song, and simply invented new words to suit himself. But why not! ‘The son of a gun, hey, Will?’ And he broke into a jitterbug, singing on about some place as if he knew where it was: ‘A buzzin, having fun down the Bayou.’
Mozzie was so comfortable sitting there, wishing and shaking about with his Roy Orbison glasses on, humming on, saying his monosaccharose was playing up again, not acting his age, juggling his extra glass eye with the blue iris. The only blue eye in the convoy. Will watched the glass eye rolling through the air, landing from one hand into the other. It was a mesmerising act. The driver became so drawn into the eye, he could not keep his own eyes on the road. Mozzie usually kept the eye in the pocket of his trousers and liked to juggle with it on winding roads. It was for this reason nobody liked to drive for him and if they complained, Mozzie had one response: ‘Get out, if you don’t like it, go on, get some other so-and-so up here. He can drive the bloody car from now on.’ The rolling blue eye stared into the back seat as it bounced back and forth. Four pairs of frightened eyes in the back seat moved in time, going left, right, staring at the false eye flipping to and fro, looking back at them, catching a glimpse of what they were thinking about: ready to jump out of that number one car, moving or not, with some so-and-so driving like he can’t wait to get to hell.
Unfortunately for them, there was one thing stopping anyone jumping from the reckless speeding convoy. It was the giddy sight down the gullies below the twisting road which had been formed and re-formed from years of washaways, and now hung like fish gills, out over edges of the limestone substrata. Who wouldn’t become recomposed, after looking down to the graveyards full of rusting car bodies littered on the bottom in a hundred degrees of heat? Before they had commenced the climb, Mozzie stopped the convoy like he had done on previous occasions and told his men assembled around him how to stay healthy by following a piece of his advice.
‘If the spirit has its eye on someone’s car on this road, if your car starts rolling backwards down the road, and no matter what, this car of yours is unable to make it up the hill, then there is only one course of action. Let the ancestor have the car and be done with it. Let him drive it around if he likes, after all it’s his country. You don’t need the car. Be happy, because one day when you go to whatever heaven claims you, you will need a car to run about in, and your old car might be good enough to be waiting there for you. So don’t be a greedy person. Let it go. Always remember there isn’t going to be a guardian angel on this rubbish heap of a road to push your car up the winding hills. Instead of poisoning yourself and anyone else with your greed and selfishness, it is better for you to chuck the useless car and let it slide to the floor of the valley below.’
Feeling satisfied, Mozzie finished the speech-making taken from his epistle without end, sighed deeply, and jumped out of the heat back into his car, after ordering the convoy on its way again. ‘One time, the spirit, he wasn’t so greedy. He only used to go for fancy wagons and animals,’ he told Will, who kept his eyes on the road. He had heard a million and one stories so far on this trip with the Fishman. Fishman continued: ‘Bones, pure white of dead horses, cattle and mules, plucked clean. You would see all of them down there being consumed by the spirit, but now he only eats cars.’
The convoy finally reached the turn-off for the last night camp before home. This stop was always a lagoon at the end of a nondescript, rocky track into the thick undergrowth of spearwood trees and turpentine scrub. Suddenly, as the country opened, and the cars crawled down onto flatter ground with a view of the water, nobody could believe their eyes. They peered through the paperbark foliage at the water’s edge onto the mirror image lagoon. Fishman put his eye back into his pocket. Those driving in the front cars wondered how could it be that someone else knew about their secret fishing hole.
As each car came over the rise and crawled down from the hill, and their occupants peered out of the dust-caked windscreens down into the lagoon, they all saw the fisherman. Right down in the middle of the lagoon, a white man was sitting out there in his boat. He was sitting as casual as can be, just like he had paid good money for the place. ‘Now, what are we going to do?’ Shallow and brackish, they all realised the lagoon was drying up until the Wet arrived. They also saw the significance of the white man being there first, and knew they would soon pull out, although still exhausted, and tired from their long travel over the dry country to get to the water, hungry for fish. Will Phantom did not speak, but he thought they outnumbered the white man, one hundred to one. Mozzie, reading his thoughts, quipped, ‘You know Will, it would be one hell of a world where the truth of reality weighed nothing.’ After a few minutes of quiet talk amongst themselves in the spearwood forest, someone who had taken a sidelong glance down through the paperbarks out over the lagoon’s edge, loudly whispered, ‘You know something? I think he’s dead.’
It was a pretty big thing to say about a complete stranger. A funny sort of joke to cause a commotion. The men jostled for a better view while their whispering grew to a crescendo, muttering to each other and trying not to notice the fisherman, while sneaking glances.
‘He’s not. He’s fishing.’
‘No! Have a flippen better look.’
‘He is dead.’
‘Told you…’
Everyone started to have a good look, staring out there, waiting for movement from the fisherman, but he stayed stationary, like a painting of a still life. For a split second, nobody knew whether to laugh or cry, it was a relief, they were by themselves after all, and there was no white man, just a dead one. But, even if it was true, their minds snapped to another truth: the convoy would have to move on.
Nobody would be hanging around for long, not if there was a dead white man sitting out there. It looked bad. It would be bad for them if someone came and started to put two and two together, making connections, constructing scenarios not worth thinking of; imagining the consequences. It looked as though his boat had become set in mud where it had moored itself, when the floodwaters had drained into the ocean, after the last wet. Now he was separated from the sea by stretches of land and dry creeks. A halo of salt lay encrusted in white crystalline moulds around the sides of the boat. It was a freaky sight, the man just sitting there, tanned skinned clinging to a skeleton. It was the most terrible thing in the world in those moments of wondering what to do. Nobody thought it was a good idea to touch the body, or to be seen bringing it into town, so they said to Fishman, just leave him sitting there.
‘Someone else will find his body eventually.’
‘He’s dead anyway.’
‘Let the water take him out, poor thing anyhow.’
Fishman nodded briefly and said, ‘Alright then. Let’s go.’
‘We are out of here.’ The word spread.
Soon, perhaps that very night, with the smell of rain in the air, and the dark clouds in the north, it would start raining, and within hours the first flush of the rivers in flood would rush out to the sea. The bush echoed with the movement of men returning to their cars, and within fifteen minutes, when Will Phantom surveyed the area, he thought nobody would have ever known there had been over a dozen cars around him.
On the road again, someone said he thought the man in the boat looked a bit like old Elias. He said he recognised the way he was just sitting there was how he remembered seeing Elias out at sea when he was a boy. Fishman said, maybe it was, how would anyone know, they only got a distant view? It could have been. The idea that it was poor old Elias travelled like some strange osmosis down the vehicles as though the convoy might have been an animal with its own brain, agreeing: Yeah! I think it was his boat too, now I think about it. It was strange indeed, they were all talking about it being Elias out there in the boat, all through the late afternoon and evening, until they crawled into the prickle bushes of Desperance about midnight.
‘Yes, it was strange,’ Fishman yawned, reserving the last words he had to say for the day for himself. He was caving in to the deep tiredness that overcomes a person returning home after a long absence. The sea air opened his dust-fevered nostrils to the fetor of rotting fish that lived permanently in the air of Desperance. It overpowered the sweet smell of fish being cooked in dozens of homes on a Friday night which too was still lingering in the air.
Mozzie lay down to sleep beside the car on the blanket he had thrown on the ground. He heard the night owl somewhere in the trees close by, and in the distance, the guitars strumming in the drinking camps over on Joseph Midnight’s Eastside. The music of Heartbeat why do you miss on a car radio, voices and laughter. Oh! For sure, some people have a whale of a time womanising, drinking, having mates. Further off still, he heard the sea woman heaving her breasts onto the beach. The familiar sounds of his past were falling from a magician’s wand, waving around specks of memory in a trail of glitter, until the specks became millions of flooding, crashing helter-skelter visions in the stars, flooding through his mind. All those deeply buried emotions relating to home had resurfaced, rising out of a cauldron in clouds of steam, to strain against each other. For a long time, Mozzie lay on the ground waiting to drift away into sleep, thinking he would go mad if his mind did not stop running until, finally, escape came when he slipped into dreams that plucked their way through Desperance and back to the events of the day.
He knew now, recapturing the sight of Elias sedately sitting in the boat as a dead man would, that this was a message given to him from the spirit world. While he stood on the brink of his dream, watching Elias in the lagoon, Mozzie felt the spirits saying that he was alright. Nobody ever knew for sure what had become of Elias after that fateful morning, when he turned his back on Desperance, and was last seen dragging his boat back to sea. Now, they knew, Mozzie thought – Elias was fine, he had gone to the spirit world in the sky across the sea, safe from the wickedness given unfairly to him at Desperance.
In his sleep, Mozzie dreamt of the moments after the convoy headed back on the gravelly road, he was sitting in the passenger seat, just staring at the empty road ahead, and thinking about Elias, and checking in his mind, taking a mental tally, walking through the rows of groaning cars, and realising what he had originally thought, that Will Phantom had left them at the lagoon and was no longer travelling in any of the other cars. His mind slipped quietly back down the spearwood-lined track, and he stood behind a cluster of trees, surveying the landscape, until he found Will sitting alone by the lagoon looking at Elias. Mozzie crept over, his feet on padded leaves, until at last, he was able to look so closely into Will’s undetecting face, it was a wonder that Will could not feel the intrusion of someone searching into his eyes, trying to dig out his soul. Mozzie, withdrew, just be satisfied, he told himself. A deal was a deal, Mozzie Fishman – You had delivered Will, as you promised, safe and sound back inside of his country. The sound of the owl brought Mozzie back to the night, and he lay half awake, thinking of Will Phantom, who had many responsibilities for one so young.
Hours of fitful sleep passed by as Mozzie Fishman retraced the journey to and fro from the lagoon, where he again hid behind the spearwood trees with the spirits of Will’s ancestors, watching over the corpse of Elias. It occurred to Mozzie that the silent spirit men were listening to the sound of Will Phantom’s country, to the dull, monotonous clanging made by heavy machinery churning and gouging into the land. These thoughts annoyed Mozzie into wakefulness, to sigh resignedly, and again, to roll over on his other side, muttering in his half-sleep to question the night: Was there any good carting around your malaise? Spreading it around the camp? Inflicting others? Where had it led to? Mozzie knew he had tried, more than some people, more than Will Phantom’s own father whom he had told two years ago: ‘I am taking Will on the pilgrimage – convince him of our ways of renewing the strength of the country.’ Norm had not batted an eyelid and continued gutting fish. ‘Nothing’s changed, Norm, you win,’ Mozzie acquiesced, seeing Norm Phantom in the dead of night, gutting a wriggling fish. Will had carried a mountain with him across the desert and in the end, everyone in the convoy carried a replica of Will Phantom’s mountain.
In some ways, Mozzie recalled feeling lighter when they left Will at the lagoon, and the convoy, even though it must have motored up the steep gravelly road again like a clumsy, panting animal, had at the time felt like a breeze, floating with the dust and untangling itself from depression. How surprising had been the feeling of relief of not having Will for company anymore, although he had cherished the young man like his own son.
‘Ah! a man does not need to sleep, ain’t worth the trouble,’ Mozzie said to himself, sick of his troubled night. He sat on his bedding and dragged dead grass and sticks into the fire with the cherished long stick he used for bashing snakes over the head. He set the billy to boil. In a few hours time it would be sunrise at home for his men.
He gazed casually through the darkness, scrutinising Norm Phantom’s place, contemplating the stubborn old coot. When he saw a light on, flickering dimly through the Pricklebush, Mozzie Fishman flashed the Clint Eastwood smile. You stupid old coot, call yourself tough, couldn’t help yourself, could you? The light intrigued Mozzie because he realised Norm had stayed up all night too, in spite of himself. Mozzie twisted his grey beard, elated about catching someone out, even in the utmost privacy of their innermost emotions. He knew Norm would not acknowledge that he was waiting for Will.
Will was never expecting any big homecoming from his father. No one imagined Norm Phantom rushing out, carrying the fatted calf on his shoulders as soon as he got the news that his son was coming home. There was no use for some angelic child rushing to tell the patriarch, See the prodigal son was coming, walking if you please, through the spinifex, over the rise. ‘Yep! Time will tell,’ Mozzie sarcastically quipped. ‘And pigs have wings.’ Will would reach Desperance in his own good time, so let the light burn in a house where a fully-grown man only had time to recognise six of his seven children. The house with a slogan: A man gets sick of running for his kids – I run for none of the buggers now. ‘It’s like that is it?’ Mozzie mouthed the words, remembering asking Norm when he had heard news of the rift between father and son. What did he say back?
He just glared for a moment, then he kept on scaling the big fish he had in his hand. Was he mad? He was mad alright. Scales were flying everywhere. What did you say then? You were a stupid man when you were young, and now, you have turned into a stupid old man, Big Mozzie remembered cursing Norm Phantom. Cursed him easily for rejecting a son like Will. Was he not made with the same blood and bone that made a good man? Indifferent, Norm spat in exactly the same way he would at a less than perfect fish on the end of a line, a puffer fish: Chuck it to the dogs. What was the difference between the patriarch and the zealot who grew out of the same Pricklebush thicket? Time would tell.
Listen to this. The talk was all over town. He did not? He did. Will Phantom of all persons mind you had absconded, flown the coup, walked. Walked where? Walked to Eastside. What did Norm say, his son and all? He swung the axe. He was hot with fever for a week. He kept swinging the axe around. All doors were slammed shut over on Eastside. A thousand nails bashed into the coffin which parents make for themselves when they throw their children away. This incident between Norm Phantom and his son gave birth to intractability on a grand scale. Oh! Well! War was war. When you have been at war for four centuries a son cannot overrule the father even in modern times. Old Cyclone, the mastermind of the old war in present east and west hostilities, long dead as a doornail, did not change matters. ‘Enemy never die,’ Norm quipped in his first and final words on the matter when he watched Joseph Midnight’s relatives carrying Cyclone’s coffin to the cemetery. Dead and good riddance, the mob on Westside remembering the good times and the bad went Hip! Hip! Hooray! Kudala! when Cyclone died, but what a man!
Memory, honoured in death, incorporated blood ties. This was what Norm meant when he referred to the enemy amongst them. Then, downcast whispers spread, unbelievable whispers full of truth and what have you, stultified the air in the Pricklebush over on Westside: Will! Oh! Dear Lord, not Will, his father’s image in every way, walking off with his own mind, apparently gone to live even, in old Cyclone’s house. The lad was stolen to the other side of town from under the father’s nose by the grand-daughter of a bad man: One for you and one for me. The nuisance haunted the living from the grave.
Cyclone was old and clever, binjuna Malbu kuluwulugu. He believed in magic and became the first person in contemporary times to turn imagination into reality. Instead of being a rain man, or weather man, like he ought to have been, he brought lies to life. One of his extraordinary stories about the ‘once upon a time’ was a fictional pig story that became a real life nightmare.
In one of his elaborate once-upon-a-time inventions there lived an illusory porker of exceptional longevity with unwholesome attitudes to Pricklebush people roaming the riverbanks. Cyclone, messing with magic in his fingers, crawled into the guts of his twentieth-century story and brought it to life. He called his creation Abilene but she came to life and left mess after mess in real nightmares. This was what happened to the Uncle from Eastside who was the original owner of the blue Toyota. Westside pricklebush people said it was a fluke of nature that Abilene only attacked members of Cyclone’s family. Cyclone had run to the police, the law, the white people when Uncle was killed. He stood around the police station in his old baggy pyjamas complaining, ‘What about all the deaths relating to only our kin?’ The new policeman pondered what he heard. ‘How come only our family is coming to this grief?’ he asked. The policeman became impatient and jumpy to use his gun. He made inquiries, made it quick smart. He called homicide up and they came up to Desperance and said: ‘It was time for some action, man!’ This was what happened when the favourite Uncle over Eastside was killed and Cyclone was running down to the police station every five minutes, and his family joined in the running after the police, until they were there all the time, jumping up and down, slapping the walls, complaining louder and louder, making threats, throwing their fish guts around and pointing their finger down Westside, over to Norm Phantom’s place.
When Norm Phantom was arrested as a murder suspect he said he had nothing to say. Proudly he walked off with the police. It would have been good if the whole world could have seen the way he just walked as though he never had any fear inside of his body. The old people reminded everyone on Westside for months afterwards what a good day it was to see someone walk like that. When the day came for him to sit in court he sat there like a rock. He said nothing to anybody. Westside folk swelled with admiration. The rallying families of the two Pricklebush factions sat on either side of the temporary courtroom set up in the lime-green Council building meeting room. Both sides were eyeballing each other. Then the whispering started. Then the all-out abuse could be heard up the street. ‘Good Lord! Thank you it wasn’t the Sabbath, because the good Lord needn’t have been in town,’ the district judge roared for silence when he made his appearance after nobody had noticed the usher had announced his entrance. He found out very fast how your ears could turn red after hearing what one of those families could say about you.
The witnesses on Norm Phantom’s side of the family said they saw no fluke there, no coincidence that the other side got the chop all of the time whilst their side didn’t. The oldest witness from Westside got up and explained that the pig was territorial and, ‘It was just going about its natural self, like Adam and Eve, pardon for using white man diction, that was why it got to hunt everything it believed belonged to itself within the precinct of its boundaries.’ The judge told the old man his story was plausible and he would consider it.
The other oldest man on Eastside, Joseph Midnight, in fact, Cyclone’s son said: ‘It was understandable why Norm Phantom was the prime suspect in matters of crime relating to Abilene.’ The judge asked him to continue his evidence even though everyone knew it was only grog talking. ‘Who knows even how close he was to the big set of gristly trotters, since, wasn’t it known how Norm Phantom could talk just plain too nicely about all matters fauna and flora in these parts?’ But the judge explained something important to old Midnight: ‘You cannot rightly accuse a man for all of them deaths just on hearsay, without hard evidence, just because he talks to the trees.’
Norm’s blood relatives testified as sober people with bent heads. They never frightened the judge or any of the Australian law because they spoke their English calmly, which they knew would not frighten white folk, who never liked black aggressors. They turned out to be reliable witnesses. Drunken people did not make good witnesses slipping around across the nice shiny, linoleum floor, running around in court with delirium tremens, not remembering who was dead or alive, disappearing for hours at a time down the pub for more heart-starter when they should have been sitting like solid citizens in the court room.
The atmosphere of the courthouse changed dramatically with a shift in emphasis on the case when Cyclone’s kinsmen came to the court full drunk, and engaged in slinging accusations at each other. The Eastside witnesses claimed Norm Phantom drove them out of their homes to live on the east side of town. They should have blamed Angel Day for that. She split the families. Then, something totally unexpected happened to the case.
The judge became impatient and sick and tired of tapping his fingers up and down on the judge’s bench as he studied it for days, figuring out the age of the pine knots and circles, in order to avoid looking at the motionless mudflats through the window, or the hawks and crows soaring in the hot thermals over towards the rubbish dump and wondering why he had not become an ornithologist instead of a judge presiding over a murder trial, while waiting for the prosecution witnesses to arrive. Suddenly, out of the blue, he snapped to the assembled law men, ‘Case Dismissed.’
Too good, cheered the Westside gallery, as the judge jumped up from his swivelling chair like he had ants in his pants, slammed his papers and judgely possessions in his Queensland port and walked out of the courtroom. Outside, the judge demanded the car keys for the Paddy Van waiting outside to pick up the drunks loitering the footpath from the court to the snake pit. The vehicle headed out of town via the footpath. Neither the judge nor the Paddy Van were ever seen again. The old people sitting in the grass with the binoculars knew what the crazy old white man went through. No secret could be kept from their prying eyes. Oh! Yeah, we know where the warri, warri ngabaya went to, they claimed. In very serious tones, reserved for a senior Law person, they explained how he had gone off to Surfers Paradise. Oh! poor, damu ngabaya. He had reinvented himself down there amongst the surfers, going around incognito in a refurbished surfie van, like a vagabond. They say you would not recognise him now, living in abandoned warehouses with the city pigeons crapping in his hair. Nobody from the Pricklebush ever told the policeman the story, otherwise, damu, damu ngabaya would be facing pretty serious charges back in Desperance.
Sweet reminiscences. Dawn crawled over the eastern horizon and Big Mozzie reckoned to himself, that his second name should have been Reminisce. It felt grand to be back with the memories of the ludicrous trial, junk foods, unhealthy intrigues and other musings about what souls do in their search for truth. The truth about the pig story. What truth could be found in watching a man concentrating on scraping fish skin with his skinning knife? What price silence?
‘They got their just deserts the pack of mongrels,’ Norm told Mozzie on the day before Mozzie took the convoy on the road again. Norm had whistled, skinning another fish, and with a twist in his face as he concentrated on the job, said, ‘Couldn’t wait for more of the bastards to go down either.’ As he listened to the dull sound of the knife scraping, Big Mozzie could not help noticing the blue guts and fish flesh spilt all over a newspaper article about killer bush pigs. Mozzie caught Norm looking at him reading the soiled newspaper. Pulling and tugging at the fish, Norm broke the silence. ‘Walking about in country, country that don’t belong to them anyway, they should be in the Territory somewhere else, am I speaking a true word or not, and that’s what happens when you do the wrong thing.’
Mozzie, not wanting to buy into the old arguments about who belongs where, said he would not know where those people should be or if there was any killing pig. Norm dropped his fish, and it went bang as it fell into a green bucket, and wiping his hands with a dirty towel, said he had more fish to catch. As he was preparing to leave, he told Mozzie he only believed what other ordinary people believed: ‘If they say there is a pig, I say the same thing. If they say he was a killer and he would kill again, I say the same thing. I am no better man than other people.’ It was no wonder you created suspicion, Mozzie thought, watching Norm Phantom walking off down the track in the tussock grasses towards his boat, ‘You bring on trouble.’