Chapter 10

The giant in the cloak

Even God goes around like one thing, they say…

Too good! Even everyone sitting around nice in the Pricklebush say they knew who the maker was. Phoney talk was often spoken there: Oh! Yes! We know him personally. Hmm! Hmm! Just like they knew November over the flat country. Oh! Heavy heart, if you were to see miracles happen, look to the heavens in November. See him properly for yourself in those dark, stormy skies of the Wet season build-up. Look for the giant in a cloak. Brace yourself when he comes rolling through the dust storm, spreading himself red, straight across those ancient dry plains, heading for town. Watch carefully for the evaporation creeping down invisibly, right into the ignorant minds of the people living in Uptown and, you know what? He turned some of them mad too, just like all those people you see living about over there in the Pricklebush.

That’s right. The giant sugarbag man of the skies walked from horizon to horizon, carrying storms and hazes of madness, and sweat! Humidity was plain old sticky syrup falling through the atmosphere like a curse. Fools. People went for it. Went mad from it. Uptown called the sugarbag man spirit ‘seasonal rains’, or their ‘silly season’, and among them there were fatalities. Statistics rocketed in mortality for both black and white, when the air grew heavy and fat. The perpetual dampness was terrible. It lasted for weeks on end, and how sick and tired of it people became. Every day, grimacing with the glare, they gazed upwards hoping for rain, and chucking their weight around for good measure when none came. You should have heard them. Presumptuous to the core, the way they assumed so much familiarity towards the Almighty maker: Calling out in their cynical voices – God! You never seem to end.

Have they gone mad? Secret! Air caused madness. Sanity? Where about? Lost, like respect was, trampled in the sodden ground. The mindless buggers split: ran off to the bush. Very likely careering around dressed as feral fairies or devils, and who knows what else they thought they were, hugging trees, or hiding among spinifex like birds, and some never came back. Others turned killers without cause. Everyone, regardless of colour, had to put up with it along the shores of the Gulf, before the rains came.

Meanwhile, mould of strange-coloured greens invaded every dampened premise, person or thing. The mildew, fed on moisture-laden air steaming up from the earth, spread a magical, sealike world above water, throughout Desperance. This short-lived phenomenon was regarded as something strange, occurring outside the realm of nature, before the dust storms came to slam doors open and shut. The mould could cloud rational thought, and they (Uptown) said some funny things to each other. When hard put by the weather, they found the words to describe a multitude of flukes, and this year, when Norm never came back from the sea, was no exception.

For years it was believed that the hens of Desperance had become bewitched and purposely covered the eggs they laid in a putrid fowl-yard muck. It was like that when the build-up called into town like an enchantress whose prime motive was to saturate everything and cause creatures of domesticity to become demons. Dogs and cats became covered with infectious sores from head to tail, and sat scratching themselves all day long. The oldest children in the population of Uptown, well on the way to becoming real Aussie battlers up North of the country, were one step ahead in being more suspicious than their parents, and without a word of doubt, cautioned younger siblings at the breakfast table. They sniggered, saying how they knew a real googie-egg when they saw one, or which were imposters used by perverse parents to insult the intelligence of children. ‘Them the ones that come out of those ugly, bare bum chooks,’ they squirmed, visualising the moulting chooks down the backyard walking around in the mud. ‘If nobody moves that egg from the table I am going to vomit.’ Whispering about the foetus: ‘See, that black thing? That is the faeces of a devil.’ A sledgehammer would not have forced one of them little Uptown kids to open their mouth for an egg after that.

See! All summer long it went on like this: What to do with children of Uptown who would not eat egg? Of course nothing but those grimy eggs had to be the main topic of interest when those little Pricklebush boys, the petrol sniffers, were arrested and taken to a shimmering silver, green, gold and red tinsel-decorated jail. Tristrum Fishman. Junior Fishman Luke. Aaron Ho Kum. Three little boys. There was a roar for those three little boys, saying, ‘They got their just deserts.’ They got their just deserts? You could spend the rest of your life examining those five words, change the sound, bend them, twist them up, even change it into something like: Just deserts! They got theirs. Like eggs. Hey! There was no cause for a speck of glitter, no fortitude of spirit to waste for them three. Why had no one walked right down there to Main Street of Uptown, to bail out of jail any one of the little petrol-sniffer boys who had been accused of viciously killing Gordie, the neighbourhood watch, the night when Norm Phantom had rowed away, taking Elias’s body back to sea?

Citizens protected by the net to keep trouble away – secure citizens, living in real houses with nice graded Uptown streets – needed to talk about ways of producing clean eggs from backyard hens, so they watched their pet fowl very carefully, to add to the conversation. Vogue was what vogue was. Nobody watched for the little boys down in the jail.

The hundreds of inbreds kept strutting about, free ranging, and with the moult, appeared half plucked, while bucketloads of summer downpours rained down on them. Hours went by: beautiful linear hours. The casual prickly bush observer, either East or Westside, knew, with the kids of Uptown, inbred fowl had no brain. The town camp people never ate those eggs. The grocery shop tried to flog cheap, dollar a dozen, dollar fifty for two, in the cartons of proper eggs which came from clean farms, ‘Down South’. Same thing, people started to get scared of anything else, foodwise, Uptowners produced to eat, like vegetables, fish cakes, sponge cakes on fête day. You could never be too careful of catching something. There was no point asking for problems.

In this era of modern domesticity, where personal interest smothers the hope and joy of all of mankind, no one in Uptown ventured outside of their louvred homes where windows were tightly shut. So much caution about the colour of skin had been dragged from the past into the new millennium. They said it was to prevent all the goings-on in the street from moving inside their homes with the breeze. Outside, in the backyards, they watched, investigated and took note of fowlry shuffling around in mud-bearing ulcerated chests, and flashing red raw bums of the summer moult.

Day in, day out, nothing seemed to be happening for the boys accused of killing Gordie. They were left there, locked up in the town’s little jail, known as Truthful’s planetarium, neglected amongst the crowded foliage of the jarrbikala’s strappy and viney tropical indoor oasis, feeling like they were starting to rot. Nobody gave a continental that those boys were standing in the same clothes they had been arrested in. Clothes turning mouldy in the damp cell. If they had looked all sweaty-skinned from the humidity building up in the bullyman’s jail, nobody noticed. That they waited sine die for justice was nobody’s concern.

‘You are going to get your just deserts for this. You are all going to pay for this, just you wait and see,’ the boys were told enough by Truthful, who, not accounting for the initial brief sideshow, when everyone in town wanted to have a look at the accused killers the day they were arrested, had increasingly become their only human contact. It often seemed to the boys, as the hours passed by, that the waiting for justice seemed to be becoming the punishment itself. They watched Truthful cleaning up around the jail building and they could see, and he wanted them to see, that he was really proud to be an active, crime-stopping policeman again.

It was obvious to the boys, watching his every move, that their jailer drove down to the pub himself to get their meals. It was not easy for E’Strange. The hotel cook, his single aide-de-camp, shook her fat permed head of stiff mauve-tinted hair in disgust, when she handed over three disposable plates of meals wrapped with alfoil. ‘Lovie, you are wasting you time,’ she warned him, as though the food was too good for those boys. The clientele watched the methodical Truthful going past by the glass windows of the public bar carrying the meals at the taxpayer’s expense, and grumbled into the bar that it was a bloody waste of taxpayers’ money and why don’t they shoot the little buggers?

The three boys, Tristrum aged ten, and his brother Luke Fishman aged twelve, and Aaron Ho Kum aged eleven, all Bob Marley look-alikes, had asked no questions, did not expect any favours, and asked for no one. Together, when they had been left alone, when sure no one was listening, they huddled in a corner spinning out in a whirl of raw-felt fear, clawing into each other, believing they were not humans. Often, they spoke about how they thought they were being kept like lizards in a zoo. Sometimes, they would hazard a guess by trying to make heads or tails out of why they were there in the first place, waiting for their ‘just deserves’. Spinning on their addiction and sudden withdrawal, they interpreted ‘just deserves’, as the impending time when Truthful would molest them.

The terrible murder of Gordie during the night of the first seasonal storm left a sour taste over little Götterdämmerung, the twilight of the Gods, some called the ceremony of thunder, on the eve of heralding all the nights of stormy weather. This particular night was the same night, coincidently, that Norm Phantom had cast off into the gloominess of the open sea under the pretext of going off fishing, and never came back. It was surely strange, given that the whole town regarded Norm with suspicion, accusing him of many unsolved crimes in the past, that no one laid a finger of blame on him for Gordie’s death. The other murders Norm had been accused of were not like Gordie’s murder at all. Those, they agreed, were only black murders. This was different and required the very best one could expect of civil action from the Australian law.

So, this was what happened. Quietly, the town celebrated Norm, the fisherman’s fisherman’s return to the sea. Years ago, before he stopped fishing, Norm’s relationship with the sea had been a beacon of light to others. His understated prowess in maritime adventures had led all nature of mature men to believe that they lived in the good company of a sea wizard in God’s own country, and once again, simply from living in close proximity to Norm’s prickly bush camp, his good luck would naturally flow onto all the others who went fishing too. The pressure imposed from the weight of seamen’s graves lifted. All negative thoughts disappeared. There was no longer an ocean full of bad omens and impending deaths. Norm made it safe for others. Everyone could go to sea now, even if only in fishy dreams of trevally-loaded seas. What other explanation could there be, for the heavy cloak of suspicion reserved for Norm Phantom to have been lifted so swiftly, and without a shadow of doubt? The nights that followed were full with a thousand elaborate dreams of seas so choking with fish, it was easier to walk over them, than take a boat.

All the brave hearts talked fish at the Fisherman’s Hotel. In calm conversation building in gentle waves, they said, ‘And why should he come back?’ It was a time for wishing and great solace was found in it. They wished that they too had no reason to come back. Everyone wished to escape paradise from time to time. Wished to slide away in the middle of the night out to the storms, throwing their fate to the sea.

So this was how it was. Ineluctable, magical moments of light-headedness flowed through town during the humidity. Somebody had been murdered, some boys had been arrested, and somebody had left town. Normal! Although many often complained about ‘the dead town with no life to it at all,’ and frequently lamented how they wanted to leave one day, it was pretty difficult to unbuckle the notions of permanence. The constricting binds strapped into their lives, strangling them with the fear of possibility. Nobody found it easy to leave their life: home, friends, parents, grandchildren. A known place to be buried in when they died.

There were not many who were prepared to take a gamble with leaving a place like Desperance. Yet, the town boasted an above average representation of professional gamblers. The leader by a long shot, was the mayor, Bruiser, regarded by some as possibly being an alien, because he knew how to brush with good luck. He sat about inside his modern lounge room with a couch bigger than anyone else had to sit on, on those stormy nights. With brown Nugget and brush, people spoke about seeing Bruiser polishing up his old bookie’s leather money bag, in readiness for the dry winter race day, to set up his bookie box outside of the pub. But Bruiser daydreamed about money traffic, where anyone passing could wager for or against Norm Phantom ever making it back to the melancholy seashores of Desperance.

When Bruiser brought the leather bag into the Fisherman’s Hotel hoping to catch what he called the ‘night swill’, word got around Desperance. All praise to the sea. Is he our man of absolute sea fidelity? Fifty to one, he’s not. Very quickly, wishing became excitement and entertainment. The gambling fever overtook the town’s shock at the murder of Gordie. The pub became so congested with gamblers and arguments about seamanship, that Truthful was called in to see what he could do. The owl-faced barman, who was implicated in the murder case by being the father of one of the boys in jail, although he had never owned up to his paternity, helped Truthful to build a queue of those inside the small crowded bar, jockeying for space.

Yesterday, all of the town was up in arms about the killing. Their usually complacent faces had turned aghast, knowing something so terrible could grab your heart and violently shake you into the quick pulse of the world. It was a pulse that demanded pay-back from your knowledge of having a little bit of secure life. It asks you to deal personally with a world where children kill. Initially, so shocked were these shattered townsfolk, they cried out to each other, What has the world come to? It was a difficult thing to deal with, this deception in their little world of Desperance. Their lives were solid, built on generations which had through the decades guarded their net of privacy and minded their own business.

Parents in this world believed in its unique position to the rest of the world. Lives could be lived in the pristine vastness of the quiet mud plains, silent saltpans and still spinifex plains, where children grew up with a sense of nature and the knowledge of how lonely the planet could be. Children in this world belonged to the thinking of fairytales which came out of books, or else, the happy life of children’s television. Theirs was the quiet world where murder was not a child’s toy.

Initially, when people of Uptown heard of Gordie’s murder, they had remained in their houses, examining their souls, never expecting to be confronted by a hideous crime committed by children. This was the sort of thing that only happened elsewhere in the mean, bad world, where the crazy people lived. They knew this because they had seen the lot on television and felt lucky, it was not Australia. Never in their wildest imagination had they expected to see the likes of downtown Desperance splashed across television, like New York, Jerusalem or Kosovo.

So, unlike the rest of the world, it was decided by the Town Council that nobody was ever to see the crying face of Desperance on television. It made a humble request to the citizens to keep their mouths shut: ‘We don’t want anyone thinking we are not decent people.’ The silent word spread the usual way by the invisible net’s strictly confidential notification system, through word of mouth. The town’s ranks closed. Even a fly found it difficult to penetrate such a closure to lay its maggoty eggs. This was truly the only place on earth where decent, lip-sealed people lived. No one would see Desperance laying its soul bare. No one would see perplexed faces stretched like fawn-coloured lino across the nation’s screens. No one would see Desperance as Desperance saw the world – static broken and lacy lines for the seven o’clock news punctured with electrical storms, until a complete blackout was achieved. This was fondly known as nature’s censorship. No one would go publicly to the world at large asking, ‘How could this happen here?’

So, poor old Gordie. The whole town cried as they rallied together one way or other to help the victim’s family. There was praying to do. The burying. They would take their part on the jury to see justice was done when the case finally came to the district court. Everybody thought mightily of their poor old Gordie. ‘He never hurt a fly,’ they said.

Initially, on that eventual morning, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the month of November, when Gordie did not play the remembrance bugle, everyone thought: Alright! Something is astray. Something smells mightily funny to me. Although, at first, everyone had thought very little about it. Perhaps Gordie was sick with the summer flu. Nothing to be done about that. Life went on as usual. Desperance was a normal town where even the bugle player had as much right as anyone else to get sick with influenza and stay home in bed. Normal people knew how to tell the time without depending on a clock, or a signal, and had enough decency, unlike the rest of the country, to stand for one minute’s silence in respect of the fallen on the eleventh hour, even without the bugle of the returned, to remind them. However, valiant attempts at normality could not replace the bad smell in the air. The people of Uptown, without realising it, started waiting for the bugle. A wave of uneasiness flowed through the town. They felt as though someone was playing around with their sense of security. Everyone started to look out for Gordie. When will he come? they complained. He should have been by by now. Fair weather or naught, everyone knew Gordie walked the town, even if he had influenza, doing his job to the hour, but naught had happened and this was not good. The day was ruined because of Gordie.

Ruined more than they thought. After the rain stopped, some poor unsuspecting anyone was whimsically walking along, with thoughts only of ploughing through the mud with a useless pair of thongs on their feet, on that same path now through the bush, and minding their own business, when Gordie was found. The body was steaming like hot bread with the two o’clock sun pouring down. Well! After that, it was Lordy! Lordy! There was nothing abstract about hell breaking loose in Desperance. The town bell would not stop ringing under the flagpole where the bugler used to play the remembrance tune. Every single citizen, first-class, second-class, third-class and any other riffraff after that, had been summoned onto the Council lawns. All ears rung with the talk, talk, talk which followed on for what seemed like hours. The powerful voices of the Town Council were overwhelmed with emotion when they said to the assembled populace, that it was a miracle any of his physical remains were found at all.

The Christian connection on the Council said Gordie must have had a guardian angel, because nobody would have found him at all if he had not been covered with blowflies. There must have been millions of the buggers, they said of the wet body. They were as thick as a black cloud. They said, those people who were at the site, that if you had moved within a certain closeness, Gordie looked like some kind of disjointed black buzzing devil letting off hot steam.

You could even see various parts of him jumping up here and there, and the rest of him – Well! Let’s say, thank God his Mother was in an institution. And two, the Council ought to start doing something about all of those camp dogs. Anybody should be allowed to shoot the bloody lot of them on first sight whenever they go up and down Main Street. Bloody nuisance they are.

The whole town began participating in an uproar about wandering dogs and petrol-sniffing kids. Find out where they come from and get the damn lazy government in Canberra to ship the whole lot back there. Send them all to Canberra.

No, the body was not a pretty sight, and the ugly head of all of those wild pig stories resurfaced about the ghost of Abilene. Terrible memories were opened up again. The grisly bush deaths in the past two or three decades, which could be counted on one hand, very quickly became exaggerated into something else. This sort of thing happens all the time, chimed some of the more disturbed townsfolk. It was the kind of talk that got everyone revved up and excitable. Volatile language was used.

There were others who had to bring the cemetery into the equation, by making one sour point after another about who was buried there. Anybody. Anything. Sometimes not even a body was even put into a grave. There should be rules about burying things over at the cemetery.

‘You want to know the truth about the cemetery?’ A loud foghorn of a voice piped up. ‘It is chock-a-block full of graves with bags full of the bits and pieces of incomplete bodies.’ Everyone knew who was talking because the foghorn man had insisted his son be buried there after he disappeared. Everyone knew he had just run away from Desperance: driven off in his Falcon after half-a-dozen send-off parties. Some day he would return, and find he had already been buried by his father.

The old people from the Pricklebush who had been picked up by Truthful, and forced to attend this meeting, were not very happy at all with this talk about the cemetery. They spat on the ground at each piece of tripe, while Uptown moved sideways in perpetual motion. It was they who saw all the dead people walking off into the afterlife. What Uptown liked to call tritaroon, quadroon, octaroon, full blood, or if speaking about themselves, friends and neighbours. Or, else, those broken parts, looking like a far cry from God’s image of a quintessential man. Imagine that. A bizarre soul hovering forever over the district, searching with the eye of an eagle into the guts of an albatross for the rest of their parts. They knew throwing stones dipped in holy water never worked miracles. Or, leaving the gizzards of a cow on the spot of the fallen. Or, throwing into the ocean, a pot of stale urine taken on the night of a full moon six months previously by a sober person from an intoxicated person. Nor any other chic, New-Age spells that people tried, to cast away the evil from invading their homes. If you were dead and still hanging around searching for parts of your body, your soul might choose a better home than the miserable one you had before.

Such was the wisdom of the elders. They said it was to be expected that people who believed only those who helped themselves got along in life, would resort to magic even in this day and age, although they never expected the Uptown mob would own up and say they were involved in it. These were serious-minded people who had escaped wars and famine from all over the world. This was why the elders were quiet at the meeting about Gordie. Anything could happen. Who knows, they whispered, what ideas Uptown would put into their heads from losing their Gordie. ‘Remember! Who bloody knows what kind of traditions people have, who say they came from nowhere and don’t believe in their own God anymore.’

Sometimes people like Norm Phantom called the community disarray of Uptown the net of irrelevance. It did not take much for ordinary Pricklebush residents, family people, to see what the elders were able to see all along. Deaths like Gordie’s gave the townsfolk the heebie-jeebies. They became hooked into a subconscious mind which was used to seeing things, particularly in those typical red-tinged cloud-covered skies of the Gulf, the narwhal-coloured disembowelled spectre of the supernatural. Half the town claimed, on the gospel truth, they owned extraordinary gifts of perception enabling them to see ghosts, as though it was like the purchase of a new car.

Everyone was blaming the petrol sniffers for killing the neighbourhood-watch person Gordie. But those little boys were never told why they were in jail. The three little boys did not speak or ask questions because they knew not to listen to anyone in town. They had been told, Every time you go into that town, close your ears to those white people who might not even be human, who may be, may be not. Uptown was a world apart, like the spiritual world, which could be imagined by children to have living there white-man spirits like fairies, goblins, elves, imps or leprechauns, or something else more sinister. What else could be true, if they had come from out of nowhere? It was hard not to listen when Uptown talked so persuasively. But little kids want to live, so they closed their ears up good.

When the town had come together on the day they found Gordie dead on the path, not many of the people who lived on the outskirts, whose houses did not qualify for the protection of the net provided by municipal services, bothered coming up to town. ‘Who cares what,’ the Phantom sisters grumbled. They agreed that they were not going anywhere near the town, if they had to stand within inches of those smelly land-thieving cunts from the other side. ‘Talk about your own business yourselves,’ Janice Phantom joked, looking towards the town, up the muddy track, as though she had the power to be heard long distance. For good measure, she held out her full left arm, with her index fingers giving her best ‘up yours’ signal, while her right hand shook the other arm up and down. ‘You wanta stop being so stupid,’ Patsy told her, and Girlie agreed.

Patsy was trying to feed a bowl of stew to Kevin with a spoon. She was annoyed with her brother because he knew he was an imposition, and by clamping his mouth shut on her, he was creating even more of a nuisance of himself. She knew he was sulking because his father had gone to sea without him, but that did not bother her, so before too long, she put her best effort towards forcing the spoon through his lips.

Girlie had just taken a shower and was feeling better after spending at least thirty minutes watching the alcohol-ridden stench of Truthful wash into the drain. There was no way any of them were going to tramp through a kilometre of muddy road just to go and listen to a bunch of rednecks. Kevin, seeing Girlie come in with just a towel wrapped around her, opened his mouth, and Patsy stuffed it with several tablespoons full of the thick mix of meat, potato and carrots. ‘Well! That’s that then,’ she said, quite satisfied with herself that the meal was finished. ‘When is that blasted bell ever going to stop ringing?’ she said. She had half the mind to go up there and bloody well kill whoever was ringing it.

The town clerk Valance, with decades of background in municipal service that had never prepared him for the likes of his position in Desperance, could not get the crime off his mind and the more he thought about it, the more he could see himself becoming twisted up in a knot about having to explain what had happened to the assembled people. The way they kept sitting around outside the Council office examining him from a distance with stern-looking faces, he thought they must have thought he had committed the murder. So, not knowing what might happen if he stopped, he kept on ringing the bell.

It looked as though the whole town had arrived to watch his baby blue eyes staring abstractly into space. His tubby body slithered up and down with the rope, pulling and sweating, as though he had been ringing that bell forever. He looked straight through the bewildered assembly who watched him very carefully, while they tried to determine if he had lost his marbles. No one felt anyone had the right to interfere with a man’s job, particularly someone they had only known for about eight years, so they sat and watched and waited, determined to let him go on ringing, at least until the law arrived.

Looking past reality, Valance saw another landscape transposed on his mind, a perfect world he had temporarily created, although it did happen. The hinterland people were saying, ‘Yes sir, listen to the bell, the angelus bell, Angelus Domini,’ and walking like pilgrims, like the holy folk would, coming into town. His efforts were especially for the town camp brethren, calling on the Holy Trinity in the storm clouds above by ringing the bell, hoping his Gods would look down on those poor unfortunates and shower them with the strength to walk to town.

Praise men of ambition who strive for newfangled ideas like reconciliation in old Australia, for Valance with his pricked conscience used every opportunity as town clerk, to make town campers feel like they were a part of the broader community. Even though Gordie was not their neighbourhood watch, Valance considered the community service was available for all folks. Yet, the longer the bell rang, the more people on both sides of the old Pricklebush wars were declaring from their respective sides of town, how they were going to destroy that bell once and for all one day, as soon as they got the chance.

In the end there was great relief to hear Bruiser and Truthful had arrived. They heard Bruiser’s mango-green reconditioned Valiant’s powerful engine groaning up along the patch of bitumen road outside the Shire Council office like some kind of suffering mud creature, until it gave up the ghost on the footpath outside the Council lawns. Bruiser, Levi’s-jeaned and check-shirted, looked hot under the collar when he got out of the car. He surveyed the assembled crowd with a quick glance to see who was missing. It did not take long before the bell was silenced. Bruiser quickly donned the mantle of his Lordship the Mayor, and with a few great strides in his moccasins, went straight across to Valance and squeezed the town clerk’s wrists until they cracked. Shocked by the pain, Valance immediately came out of his trance. ‘He won’t be doing that again for a while, let’s hope,’ Bruiser said.

‘My mate here,’ Bruiser said, patting Truthful on the shoulder. ‘He knows what to do, and he will be doing it directly, straight after this meeting is finished. There will be no mucking about getting the cops up from down South. We got our own policeman right here, who knows us, knows what we want, and knows this town doesn’t want to be mucked about. Not like in the past, about all of them unsolved deaths around the bush here.

‘What did those police that they sent up from down South somewhere, know what to do? They don’t know us. Did they look like they knew us, or were even bothered to ask us what we think, and we live here all the time? No, they just went around wasting taxpayers’ money, made a right monkey of themselves, and whoosh! Where did they go? We looked around and found ourselves sitting here like we always have because? Because we belong here.

‘They had gone off, no goodbyes, thanks for the hospitality or anything. They just got back into their chartered planes, and flew off, and that was the last we heard of them. And what did we get out of it? Sleepless nights wondering if we’s going to be murdered in our own beds, wondering if we are going to wake up in the morning, or whether we might be dead. You right mate? A penny for them?’ Bruiser turned to check on Valance. There were coughs and silly grins in the audience.

‘We found the evidence, darn right we did,’ Bruiser continued, pausing to slap Truthful on the shoulder again. Truthful nodded. Valance looked up from his seat with interest. The townsfolk sighed relief. ‘Poor old Gordie and his wretched soul, parts of which would be being digested by camp dogs but for the strangest coincidence,’ Bruiser rattled on as though talking about a normal day, flicking the switch occasionally for good measure, to throw in a bit of the fanciful the locals loved to hear. ‘But you know what? There were rainbows appearing across the sky through the clouds.’ Something miraculous seemed to have happened, because one of the rainbows actually ended directly over the spot where they had found Gordie. Even Bruiser took on an angelic face when he pointed out the phenomenon. The crowd turned around, craning their necks to look in the direction Bruiser was pointing, looking over the roofs of houses, to the outskirts of town, amongst the ruby saltbush on the side of the muddy track. Multiple rainbows were fairly common in the wide skies of the flat lands.

‘See! Gordie was going straight to heaven. God sent him a rainbow to walk on for only God knows where Desperance is. You know where the good folk live, don’t you Lord? But for God’s sake! What! Listen! There was more to it. God was telling me what to do, God was telling me he will punish the wicked. Thank you Lord, I said, but we already know who did it Lord. We know for sure, and we will make sure they don’t get away with it. So after we finish talking, we are going to go straight there and arrest the little buggers. Well! Goodbye then, Gordie ya big long streak, we will always remember you. Pray for us Gordie.’

At this point Bruiser, sticking to his script, shut his mouth. He looked into the crowd with feigned innocence on his face. He searched the eyes for non-believers of the Christian faith. There had to be someone. Where? Where? Who was it going to be this time? Instead, to Valance’s astonishment, people started babbling all of their hidden prayers, praying loudly for Gordie. And Bruiser, whose scarred face usually gave him the impression of being a descendant from aliens, now looked different too. Valance was at a loss to understand what he had done to his face. He began to see what others were already seeing; it was like looking at a holy man.

‘Hush now folks,’ Bruiser finally spoke, repeating his request over and over, until he regained the full attention of the meeting. ‘Save your prayers for later folks, we have got a lotta hard work to do here first. First, we need to get organised with putting some men together, because we are going to arrest those little petrol sniffers who did this to Gordie, too right we are. Whose names we got coming now?’

The air bristled. Everyone knew what Bruiser was referring to. It was plain easy to reminisce the kind of yesterday antics of Will Phantom: arsonist, stirrer, troublemaker, cars running up and down the street in the middle of the night. So much trouble, fights and what have you, all because one person kept telling the world he did not want the mine to be built. The very building they were sitting in front of, the beautiful new Council offices, had replaced the one they all reckoned he burnt down. Someone had to have done it. It could not have burnt down by itself. Happily for everyone, the good neighbour mine came to the rescue. It honoured its word: said it was going to donate a brand-new building when it got the green light on Native title problems. They had Will Phantom to blame for that too. Well! It looked as though something like that was stirring its ugly head about race relations again.

‘Ya gotta nip it in the bud this time, ya hear me, ya honour?’

‘We aren’t gonna put up with that same trouble. Turning everyone inside out.’

‘No,’ Bruiser was the first to agree. ‘Just like I said. We will do it differently this time, won’t we?’

Everyone knew of those little petrol sniffers living in fortresses of abandoned car bodies. The window smashers. There was a whole group of them moving from one car body to another. Just recently, some had moved to a car abandoned by the Fishman mob lying right next to the path that Gordie used. It had been stripped down to nothing. They were the ones who spray-painted graffiti on tin fences around town, Petrol Sniffers Don’t Die. You just had to read it and say – Who were they kidding? Everybody knew who they were. They knew because the boys had broken into their properties and stolen things and nothing happened to stop it. They knew because petrol had been taken out of their cars on such a regular basis, big, fat padlocks had to be welded onto the petrol tanks, because nothing was done to stop it. The whole town had to become fastidious about locking up: car doors, doors to their houses, everything of value locked up for security against petrol sniffers, and still nothing was done about it.

Everyone had seen these boys walking about town, speeded up on petrol fumes and looking like zombies, walking straight past people as though they did not exist, sometimes with their little girls in tow, initiated by older boys on petrol as well. Disgusting skin and bone creatures who looked like nobody fed them. Or was it right like Valance kept saying: petrol was the only thing that kept the hunger away?

‘How did you know it was them?’ Valance asked, still nursing his wrists, wading against the tide.

Bruiser, whose motto had always been Hit first, talk later, glared at Valance, hoping he would get the message to shut his bloody mouth up. If only Valance had been a drinking man, Bruiser had always thought, once again regretting the Council’s choice of recruiting another Southerner to the job. Two minutes in town and he had something to say about everything. The man had been driving him crazy ever since. Down the pub it would have been different. He would have settled the matter of a man like Valance wanting to be a control freak, quick smart, and afterwards, he would be broken in about how to get things done in the Gulf. He regretted not having broken his bloody hand or bashed his teeth in: one thing or the other. He reminded himself to do the latter first opportunity, but not now. This was a delicate matter, except, if Valance pushed too far, Bruiser wondered whether he would be able to stop himself.

‘How come we know? What are you saying Valance? How do you think we go about making accusations? I’ll tell you something Valance, and listen good because I am not going to repeat myself about this stuff. This is not a Council meeting Valance, where we are sitting around on our arses pushing paper about like we got nothing better to do with our time.

‘This is about real people who get out there and they get the job done. Maybe some people need to get out of their air-conditioned offices once in a while. Like the rest of us in the heat of the day. But hey! Wait a minute. Valance, are you trying to tell me something like I think you are thinking: that I am making little fibs to tell people? You think people are stupid or something? If you are accusing me, you better get out with it Valance. Let’s stop beating around the bush because I will tell you something, I haven’t got time for frigging around. You know what I should be doing right now? Getting a thousand head of cattle to ship to Asia by Tuesday. I’ve got no time on my hands I can tell you, to sit around pondering, who bloody did it.’

The townsfolk were in awe about the enormity of Bruiser’s life. ‘Man! A thousand head of cattle. Those cattle on the road now, Bruiser?’

Valance interrupted: a nervous response which had momentarily overtaken him. ‘No! How do you know it was them? That’s all I am asking.’

‘Tell him, Bruiser. He’s got a right to know, I suppose,’ another voice strung out of the meeting. The silence of consensus followed, and chastened Bruiser who continued directing his speech to Valance, in a tone which suggested he was talking to an idiot.

‘One of them little black bastards left his red thong behind right there on the spot, that’s what, and whoever it fits, or whoever we find walking around with only one thong on his feet – Well! You work it out. Number two. Another one left his cap behind. He was in such a hurry, rushing off, and it don’t belong to anyone either because it belongs to one of Mozzie’s boys. It’s got the kid’s name written on it. What a shame the father don’t stay around town and be a real father for a change. That’s the proof of it and we found another thong left behind as well. Well! We not going to wait around for the CIB, or any other Southern copper to come up here and fail his duty to this town, like last time when that smart-arse Will Phantom ran amok, remember that? Burnt down half the bloody town and got away with it. Lack of evidence still makes my blood boil: Lack of evidence. Bullshit.’

Trailing off his speech by making a fist into his open palm, Bruiser felt he had said everything that needed to be said, and looked across at Truthful standing beside him for support.

The crowd grew noisier. Neighbours spoke to one another across the rows of plastic chairs in approving terms of Bruiser’s no-nonsense course of action. All of the men and their big boys volunteered to spend the rest of the day hunting down every petrol sniffer in sight. Bruiser was quick to rein in the stampede for the man-hunt. ‘Whoa, hold on boys. We got to get a grip on this thing first, hold your horses, hang tight to your seats there for a minute. The Constable here has to do some checking first off. Go for it Constable E’Strange.’

‘Alright! Alright! Settle down everybody,’ Truthful took over. ‘We all know a very serious crime has been committed and we have to make sure we follow the letter of the law because I don’t want to fill the jail up with the wrong people, and I don’t want to be arresting you folk because you are upset neither. We, you and I: it is our responsibility to see justice is done and done correctly. So, let’s be calm now.

‘First off, we are only after three boys at the moment, there could have been more, but we got to go by the evidence, and we got the evidence like the Mayor just told you. We know who we got to go and find, young Tristrum Fishman and his brother Luke.’

Voices in the crowd interrupted Truthful, calling out that these kids should have been hung, drawn and quartered a long time ago. For two little boys, they certainly had a bad reputation in Uptown. Someone speaking loudly, told Truthful to fix the little bastards this time. One woman added her voice to civic duty: ‘This time lock the little mongrels up so they can never get out, and throw away the key while you are at it.’

All that said, Truthful continued. This part troubled him. ‘The other boy we have to find is,’ stopping mid-sentence to take a deep breath, before he said the name, ‘Aaron Ho Kum.’ That raised a few eyebrows, and complete silence. Nobody wanted to call out about the parents now, like they were doing a minute ago.

A penny for your thoughts now, big, righteous Uptown. Every person sitting there knew who these boys were, even if they were not considered the property of the town itself. Hinterland, edge people was where the petrol sniffers came from. From the camps somewhere where the blackfellas lived, because you do not get this kind of trouble from the sons of Uptown, except…Except there was a question mark on Aaron Ho Kum. Those two Fishman boys belonged to Mrs Angel Day. She goes and has them one after the other, after she leaves her real family high and dry to fend for themselves in the Pricklebush. Oh! Yes, she was the one, everyone knew her: a real tart. And where was she today? I say she’s lying flat on her back hmm! hmm! legs spread doing you know what. Too busy to spare a few minutes to come down to the Council lawns like everybody else and get involved with civic duty.

‘She don’t look after them boys does she?’ the white lady folk were whispering loudly to one another, ‘No, she can’t be bothered. She just lets them run loose.’

No one looked in the direction of the barman, Lloydie Smith. Everyone knew he was the so-called father of Aaron Ho Kum, even though he had never publicly acknowledged the mother. Well! Radar was what radar was. There had been talk when that child was born. Everyone had been dead keen to have a gander at it, to see if it was white, and she had only been half a kid herself at the time. The scandal of it, no one thought having a baby to the barman would mean she was destined to live Uptown. When that turned out to be the case, she just wrapped that kid up, summer time and all, so nobody could see it.

Nevertheless, black was black. No living person could change the colour of skin. When the white father had never even bothered claiming his coloured child, even though everyone else was saying it was his, she made a horrific vow. Just as she said, she never ever went to Uptown again. Some say, it was because of the vicious rumours, that the poor woman decided to live cooped up in a little dark room with the door shut and locked. Her brother claimed she made her stand, her skin eventually turned white, just like a white woman’s. Now, he claimed, she was scared of what people would say. She was too proud to come out and face the music after all these years, and why should she, the wise brother said, explaining: ‘The world goes round and round, and it was not going to change one little bit for one moment in her lifetime, or anyone else’s who’s black around Desperance as a matter of fact.’

Never a flash man, he spoke plain about what other people only liked to think. Miscegenation was the word, he said, for interbreeding: ‘was treated as though good white sperm had been falsely procured by a lesser kind and produced a snake.’ The woman’s brother looked after everything the best he knew how, including being a father and a mother, right from birth, to the little troublemaker Aaron. Everyone knew he did everything, while trying to mind a herd of goats he kept on a high block, south of town. He now had two hundred goats, all kinds and colours interbred from building on fifty years of goats, living on the very same spot. Whenever the wind turned, and ran from the south, the pungent stench vaporising out of that piece of ground stank the town out. The goats’ wind it was called. The wind with no wife. The Uncle worked hard because of the goats, fed his family, fed the goats, milked the goats, made the town’s cheese, and bought freezers to store his product when the Town Council provided him with a power line. It prided Uptown to see Aaron Ho Kum’s Uncle do well with a hard life. It pleased them to watch the goat shepherd walking on foot, in weather fair or fraught, tending his flock. Only thing though, and it troubled Uptown, for they could not help thinking that Aaron was funny sort of material to be mixing up in the gene pool and all.

There were a lot of theories, but no answer.

All the country mob in the Pricklebush were shaking their heads disbelievingly, when they heard about what happened. Up and down the Pricklebush, you could see people going along to each other’s place, and asking: ‘You know why those three little petrol sniffers would want to kill Gordie in the middle of the night?’ It was a million-dollar question.

The three boys were asleep when Truthful and Bruiser found them. They were lying side by side, just like they were sardines squashed in a rusty shell, and this was what they might have looked like, when they were found inside the upside-down Holden sedan they called home. The car body was jammed into a camouflage of dense thickets of pricklebush. The dehydrated boys, awoken when dragged out of the car body by the neck, were vaguely aware in a déjà vu kind of way, that something bad was happening to them. Had they escaped one net and fallen straight into another? Only yesterday, members of the Fishman’s convoy had unsuccessfully scoured the whole countryside around Desperance searching for those naughty boys.

Angel Day told Mozzie the boys did not live with her, they moved around with relatives. She hardly saw them and that was true.

Those up-to-no-good boys hid here and hid there, even though they knew their old Daddy was looking for them. They knew how to dissolve into thin air, being nothing more than skin and bone kids. One minute they were seen, and the next minute they were gone. Each could have been a blade of grass, or a little prickly bush, they knew how to do it.

When the convoy left town, those cheeky boys came out from hiding, jubilant smiles running across their faces. ‘You are in charge Tristram.’ ‘You the power.’ ‘No you the destroyer man Aaron.’ ‘You are.’ ‘You are.’ Tumbling through fairyland, their voices rang through the grasslands, and this was young hope, the place where optimism should dwell. Finally, sitting on the roof of the old car body, feeling safe, they watched the exodus of dust heading down the south road. The last thing they wanted was discipline. Being on the road for months and months with Mozzie Fishman’s convoy was not likely to be any picnic. He had warned them: ‘Break ya leg first with a bit of wood if I ever catch ya sniffing petrol.’ They had heard all about the Fishman’s reform agenda for petrol sniffers.

It was unfortunate for them that they were incoherently high on petrol, glue, metho, or whatever cocktail had been their last meal, when Truthful and Bruiser found them. Neither of the three had any idea what was happening to them when the two men threw them into the back seat of the lime-green car and sped over to the jail building. They were dragged inside the premises of the lockup, through to the back, into the walled exercise yard, and thrown around the walled space as though they were sacks of potatoes. Like potatoes, the boys just hit the floor and stayed where they fell.

Manhandling was proving to be a pretty fruitless exercise, as Truthful was quick to discover. He suddenly stopped throwing the boys around. A cop had to remember his duty. Truthful noticed how abstract their blood looked, as it dripped down from the clean walls and onto the clean concrete floor. A sickening image of cattle being slaughtered flashed across his mind, and the first thing he understood was, he would have to clean up. With a mind trained for recording detail, he remembered the detainees were semi-comatose when apprehended. This fact would be written into his formal report. Now, he finds, they are starting to look as though they had been put through a mincing machine.

Even Truthful knew this was a dumb move. ‘Hey! Come on Bruse, this is not getting us anywhere.’ He noticed the panic in his voice. If! If! imprinted on his consciousness like a highway poster. If there was a Death in Custody. He knew the sucker who would take the rap for it. But not if he could help it, he was not going to be the fall guy. It would be Bruiser’s word against his. Quickly the pennies fell, all saying, someone needs to be smart. He realised there wouldn’t be one politician, or bureaucrat connected with the State government, who would be game enough to challenge the influential Bruiser, Mayor of Desperance in the woop woop, and get away with it. ‘Constable,’ he told himself smartly, ‘you are on your own.’

The policeman watched helplessly as Bruiser hauled up one of the boys, holding him at face level, while his spit sprayed into the boy’s face as he spoke.

‘Where were you last night, you little piece of shit?’ Bruiser demanded, his scarred face set like concrete, sweat running down from his hairy skull, over his lumpy forehead, and onto his exposed brown teeth, baring now like those of a savage dog. The boy looked dully at the man through his hooded eyelids, incapable, it crossed Truthful’s mind, of even opening his eyes in fright. The lack of response from the boy did not lessen the sport, because Bruiser read the situation as meaning only one thing, contempt.

‘You don’t want to tell me, and if you don’t tell me, you make me mad, and you know what’s going to happen if you make me mad?’ He looked into the boy’s face, which was only inches away from his own, and found it was blank. So, with his other hand rolled into a fist, he rammed it into the boy’s stomach and sent him flying. Truthful saw the boy land, slammed into the far wall, where he fell into a crumpled heap.

‘Shit! Bruiser. Enough, before you go too far.’

The big man was lost in a frenzy. His huge frame stomped from one end of the small exercise yard to the other, while kicking and dragging up one limp sack and throwing it against the wall, then picking up another and throwing it, and another. This struck Truthful in an oblique kind of way as overwhelming reverence towards the search for truth, to the point that it meant killing everyone in the increasingly bloodied yard to find it.

Truthful tried to drag Bruiser outside, but the older man was bigger, and stronger in his new-found strength. ‘Let’s go mate and see if we can round up the parents. Who knows? Maybe they can give us a clue about what happened,’ he said, trying in a last ditch vain attempt to place himself in front of Bruiser who was ducking and weaving to get past. ‘Stop it! Stop it! You want to be up on a murder charge?’ Truthful yelled at him.

Bruiser could scarcely believe his ears. Was he hearing things? Who was going to be on the murder charge around here?’ Thump! Crash! Another kid went flying past the cop. At this point, Truthful lost his temper. The idyllic country cop was dismissed with a click of the fingers, and the Valley cop re-emerged like a circus trick. Here was the set face of law and justice in a city alley after midnight. It belonged to a cop who did whatever it took to survive rort and corruption. He drew his gun. A shot went into the sky. The whole town must have heard it. The clouds paid back with thunder. He pointed the gun straight at Bruiser’s face, stood firm, following Bruiser’s movements. ‘Fucking stop fuckhead, or I’ll fucking use it.’ Bruiser looked at him for a moment, noticing the finger firmly over the trigger, and laughed. ‘Bloody Mafia,’ Bruiser blurted out over his laughter, having been reminded of scenes from The Godfather I or II, it did not matter, it was what he thought. ‘Has anyone ever told you you look like the son of a Sicilian Mafia leader?’ Truthful kept his aim with his eye fixed on the target.

‘Well! Okay. If you want to shoot me, then, come on, shoot me here,’ Bruiser pointed to his forehead. ‘Then look at them murdering scum and shoot them, put them out of their misery the dogs, you idiot!’

The moment passed and the cop put his gun away. He felt defeated. He was angry with himself now. Only a junior cop would go around pulling his gun like a cowboy. One stupid decision and he knew he had lost all the credibility he had earned, cultivated over years, to become Bruiser’s mate. Now, except for the sound of rain falling and thunder from a nearby storm, there was silence in the human corral. The cop dragged each of the boys inside to the cell and locked them in. Bruiser dusted dirt off himself, and washed his hands at the wash basin in the office, then stalked outside to wait in the car.

They drove around town through heavy rain and mud, wheels spinning in the wet clay, engine smoking, skirting the mud larks. Bruiser did not seem to care anymore about the condition of the car: forgetting how he had considered it was sacrilegious if anyone laid a finger on the shiny new paint work. To the passing stares, he sneered, ‘Wave. Captains of society wave. So wave and show some respect, even if they didn’t teach you those things where you come from.’

They arrived at Angel Day’s Uptown house first. Her house was a little grey fibro job. Nondescript really, with cracked and broken fibro louvres, sad and sorry walls. The lot thrown together sometime in the sixties on a cement slab in a big empty yard. It had one saving grace. An address that somehow stoked the fires of passion in even the hardiest of hearts, as they passed by. A house which showered cupid’s arrows on sweethearts it was thought, by those who believed it had happened to them, because of the house. A house infectious with burning lust which inspired forbidden imaginings in passing lovers. Dogs and cats on heat stopped by each evening to mate in the yard. Which goes to show, that love knoweth no obstacle, and does not discriminate.

This was the house of the long hot summer night. Mozzie Fishman had bought it for a song, when Angel had abandoned her plain old life for another; ‘simply,’ she explained, ‘to lose myself and come alive again in hot, humid caresses, for love’s sake, for the last third of my life at least.’ The wish was granted. With the lights out, it could have been a shrine of love from another time or another place, equal to the greatest loves of all times, even the Valley of the Nile, for sometimes after the devil’s dancing hour, it became so inflamed, it floated, and he could have been the Mark Antony of men, and she, the Cleopatra of women.

So far from the truth. In this house, Angel Day spent numerous months alone with her two new sons, to sing the lonely person’s lullaby, Send me the pillow that you dream on, so, darling, I can dream on it too. During Mozzie’s many flights of absence, she claimed to any audience whatsoever, the loneliness had caused her to collapse into temporary insanity. If the imagination could stretch the truth, then, it was just as Angel Day claimed, when she said: ‘It was the house that sullied the mind of all who looked at it.’ This was why she too thought it was a house of miracles. For goodness’ sake, from it materialised the birth of two boys at her age, and he, an old man. This twice lucky phenomenon, the whole town marvelled at, as though it had been lust that did these things, but Angel Day said sadly, as far as she knew, it was both times an immaculate conception. That Angel Day, she had no shame, and she gave those two boys the Fishman’s name, even though they were not even married.

As a matter of fact, in that very house it was rumoured she had loosened herself, by lying about in others’ arms during her lonely moments. With bated breath, the town hung in suspense for Mozzie’s return whispering, Well! The truth will come out now. But the miracle of Mozzie Fishman was that he forgave her from the bottom of his heart, every time.

From across the road, people heard Bruiser’s car pull up. Dolly Parton was singing loudly on the radio, God doesn’t make honky tonk women. Along the rooftop sat a line of seagulls looking down, staring at Bruiser and Truthful with beady eyes. Both men walked through the gap where the gate had been, in readiness to accost Angel Day, and arrest her too. What for? Neglect. The birds flew off, swooping low over the yard, just as they had done earlier, when they had flown over the exercise yard at the jail.

Of course Angel Day was not at home. The big statue of the Aboriginal Virgin Mary had been left in charge. It stood in the sparse lounge room amidst a mass of plastic flowers, as if to watch over the birds that pecked each other on the roof, and the house’s proportion of the Gulf country’s croaking frogs that sprung into silence in the grass outside as soon as they heard noise.

Truthful said he thought the house looked like a shrine or a grotto, which was very strange, because he did not think she was a religious person. Statues were the kind of thing his Mother had in her house. If they had come when she was home, they would have known she had left behind in those silent walls, a barrage of abuse to the petrol-sniffing sons who hid themselves from her, every time she wanted them to do something. The statue dominated the house, and the eeriness for them felt too serene in its total silence. It was as though someone had died.

The atmosphere of religious piety felt disconcerting, so, being thorough, in case of some deception, some trick of the eye, they broke the house. Nothing would be preserved of the quaint architecture for the town’s posterity. In the shadowy walls, the ghosts of rosaries watched, while the two men worked desperately hard to destroy its incomprehensible meaning, its contents, its beliefs. The ramshackle house remained silently serene as the yard frogs approached, when the two men left. One by one the green creatures came inside, and so did the birds, hopping up to the open front door, deciding to move in, rebuilding the life of the love nest.

‘Nothing doing,’ that was the size of the thing, the two men agreed. Again, they walked around the rusty Holden car body, searching for clues. The day was almost over, and there was nothing left of it with the disappearing daylight, except to go down to the pub at sunset, where the usual group of men hung about. There was not much that they did not know about the politics of the State, thanks to Bruiser. He swung around on his revolving bar stool, giving the very latest news about the legislation going through Parliament, the particular failings of the legislation, and how, yet again, nobody ever took any notice of his advice.

The men talked about the mine down the road. They discussed how the ore body was shaping up in the latest chemical analysis. They talked about which part of the huge open cut was being operated on, how low the underground shaft would go before the mineral vein petered out. The extraction methods tailor-designed for the vein. The never-ending problems of pumping surface water from the pit, and the ground water tests. Could the aquifers be drying up? The talk could go into hours of general analysis, right through to the functioning of hundreds of kilometres of pipeline, the dewatering of the ore on the flood-prone coastline, and the barges operating with near mishaps while transferring the ore onto the big foreign tankers, which were a sight to see off the coastline.

This was the talk of work. This, and talk about herds of cattle and the slump in prices, other people’s horses, whose broken fences were needing a blow by blow description of repairs and maintenance. Then, once a man was talking about his outdoor work, he got around to speaking about the mysteries of the min-min light and who saw it where. How long it followed the car. How spooky was that? Or, in October, the morning glories crossing the skies.

Money and wives were two subjects of discussion that made the dozen beady-eyed men look depressively at the comfortable pub decor of stuffed baby crocodiles crawling up the wall, and the tanned skin of the biggest croc ever caught. These were two of Norm’s special works of local fish mounted and displayed proudly on the walls. Elsewhere, the walls were stuffed with autographed stubby holders, or pinned with nude pictures of women. From the ceiling hung dusty flytraps that flew about in the breeze of the overhead fans in front of the glass-fronted fridges holding fine wines and red, green, white and yellow cans of beer.

On the jukebox, droning country and western music occasionally seduced eyes to look yonder, through the little window slot that separated the Barramundi bar from the ugly, stained, mustard-coloured walls of the snake pit next door, which was crowded to overflowing with ‘the darkies’. As they talked, the Barramundi bar drinkers observed the young men from the Pricklebush around the snooker table in a play-off. They had a good squiz at the dressy black women sitting around the plastic tables laughing as if there was no tomorrow. They placed bets on the frequent drunken fights that went on and on until the defeated ended up lying motionless on the ground outside. Silences led to the usual daydreams of fish, then the talk resumed of fishing and boats, and all kinds of roads, rivers and ocean tracks which led them to fish.

Young Kevin Phantom was not welcome at the snooker table as he swung in and out through the lads standing around playing the game. All the bigger and stronger boys in T-shirts and jeans took appearance and life seriously, while standing beside the snooker table. They said to Kevin, ‘This is a serious game.’ Kevin had had more than enough to drink simply by persuading people to pity him because he had no money. A few of the lads gave him their own half-drunk cans, and went and bought themselves a fresh one. He was given sips, as he worked his way around the room, just through speaking loudly into anyone’s ear, and pestering until someone gave him some. After a few hours, nobody wanted him around, and someone went over to the bar to ask Lloydie Smith, the barman, to get him out of the place.

‘Hey! Lloydie, come over here. I want to talk to you,’ the woman called out, but the barman had his back to her.

All eyes from around the plastic tables were looking towards the window where the woman kept calling, and waiting for Lloydie to hear her. The more she got into the rhythm, she made a game of calling out ‘Lloydie’, then standing aside to wink back to the tables, motioning with her lips ‘have a look’, and rubbing her backside with one hand. Everyone started looking. Their eyes, drawn through the window slot, peered across the bar to where Lloydie was standing, then the nudging began, eyes lighting up in merriment, ‘Oh! Look! He is doing it again.’

They saw Lloydie Smith wiping down the bar that was made from grey-brown planks salvaged locally from an ancient shipwreck. He worked with a wet cloth that was impregnated with spilt beer, and he worked on the wood carefully, in rhythmical motions, as though he were caressing a woman’s skin. Truthful watched his hands at work, fastidiously cleaning, smoothing, fussing as he always did. Already he felt in the mood to see Girlie. He left Bruiser, who noticed nothing, to do the talking.

‘Well! Lloyd, what about it then, that son of yours?’ Bruiser never cut corners with his bluntness.

‘I burnt my bridges there years ago and you know it, so it’s got nothing to do with me,’ Lloydie replied in his short tone of voice.

‘You want to come down and help us ask him what happened, you might be able to get it out of the little bugger?’

‘Nope! Nothing to do with me.’

‘We’ll ask his mother then, if we can get her to talk.’

Lloydie happened to know her brother, the goat man, had had it up to the eyeballs with Aaron, and had said he would kill the little bugger the next time he saw him. And she, if you looked in the cupboard with a torch, all you would see was a black woman with white skin, who spoke even less than the spirit of the beautiful fish woman, locked inside the timber planks of the bar. He felt her body responding to the soft touch of his hand. Moving her silvery body further towards him with every movement he made. When he looked at the wood he saw the outline of her body luxuriously posed and hungry for touching. It was fascinating to him that nobody else saw her moving her body around at him through the wood. He could hardly believe that she only had eyes for him, as though they were always alone. She was the she-fish, who had come alive from his erotic dreams, that had seemed so lifelike that he had now taken up the habit of sleeping on the top of the bar at night.

‘Go ahead,’ Lloydie said, more or less oblivious to Bruiser’s enticing. ‘Talk to the brother, maybe he can help you.’

By the time Lloydie had finished talking to Bruiser, and responded to the inebriated woman screaming out to him from the bar next door, Kevin Phantom had disappeared.

‘Where are you going?’ a male voice wafted out of the car window on the passenger side, as a vehicle slowed down next to Kevin walking along the footpath in the rain.

‘Yu wanta lift Kevin?’ the voice continued, but Kevin kept on walking, hardly aware of the car. He was thinking, wondering where his father had gone and when he was coming back.

‘He should’na left me,’ Kevin said, continuing to walk, as the car purred, moving slowly along beside him.

‘We would’na leave you, come on, and we’ll have some fun without him,’ the voice hummed in tune to the car’s motor turning over.

‘You got a party going then?’ Kevin asked, opening the door of the car and jumping in.

‘Yeah! You’re the party coon boy,’ the voice snapped, and the car roared off along the sealed road, did a wheelie down the end, roared back past the pub, turning there at high speed, tyres screeching. But it bothered no one. Truthful and Lloydie were outside the pub armed with batons, fighting some of the men who had been attacking each other with broken beer bottles in the mustard bar.

‘Clear the whole place out, I have had enough of the buggers,’ Lloydie ordered Truthful, as the car swung around the corner. It was action night, the whole place, except the main bar where the dozen men drank, was to be cleared. The car headed off along the bitumen stretch going south of town. All Kevin could see were the white hoods each of the people in the car had placed over their heads. Then he felt the hands of someone in the back seat pushing something over his head. He reached up and felt the rough thread of the material, like a sack, and he could smell wheat or flour, like poultry feed. He knew the smell, recognising it from when he had passed Uptown people’s backyard fowl coops. You could smell it from the street if you were passing by some houses.

Kevin knew he had to get out of the car, but he feared the consequences of jumping out, as it headed along the bitumen at high speed. Struggling, he twisted around in his seat until he felt the handle of the car door but realised it was locked. He reached for the lock but felt the knife gliding along his neck being pressed deeply into his flesh. There were several voices in the car, all talking to him at the same time. ‘Take this for Gordie,’ fists flew at him from the front and from the back. He started to panic, and in his panic, felt spasms running through him. Kevin had moved into another world, when suddenly the car stopped, and he was tipped out onto the ground.

Someone said, ‘Great.’ He had found the cricket bats in the boot. Kevin slipped in and out of believing it was not happening to him, hearing war cries, laughter, and smelling beer and rum. He tried to rip the sack off his head because he couldn’t breathe but the knife dug deeper, cutting him. Then the knife was released by the attacker who had been holding him from behind, breathing alcoholic fumes into his ear. When he started to struggle with the sack again, he felt the knife swung about as if it was being used to slash at his hands.

Whenever he regained consciousness, it was to feel the thud of being struck with something heavy. He heard his bones break with a pain that forced him to open his shock-sealed lips, and call out through the muffling bag to his father. This was when, through the white light of pain, he witnessed his childhood, always moving back into the arms of his father. A little boy safe with his father: telling his father to run, run faster, and he felt himself sinking into water. He was wet and hurt, and his arms, stretched out in front of him, they were being dragged off his body. His skin was burning, he was being skinned alive, pulled behind the car, its exhaust fumes choking his breath.

It was during the night sometime when Truthful was driving towards the Phantom place, and in the headlights, he saw Girlie sitting out there on the road. When he stopped, he saw in the light from the car, the body of Kevin lying on the road beside her.

‘We got to get him out of here now,’ he said quickly, but she did not move as she sat crying beside her brother, his head on her lap. She continued explaining to Kevin that she had no idea how to bring him back to life. ‘Where do I start Kevin?’ Truthful saw what had happened. She had only untied his hands and removed the sack from his head.

‘I don’t know what to do, it will be alright,’ she kept talking, rocking him and talking.

‘Where’s Janice and Patsy,’ Truthful asked, picking Kevin up.

‘Nobody’s here,’ Girlie said, barely able to speak coherently as she rambled on to her brother.

They drove Kevin straight up to the hospital. The sister in charge, with no one else to support her, led the way inside the fibro building. It was clear she reigned in this isolated outpost south of town. Within minutes, she had Kevin on a drip with an oxygen mask over his face, pumping air into faint lungs. Then she was on the phone in front of the computer records, ‘Is that you Doctor? This is the situation.’

Girlie stayed next to Kevin watching his bleeding chest moving rapidly as he breathed through the mask. She could hear the sister’s voice, repeating instructions from the main district hospital six hundred kilometres away, and heard her telling Truthful that the flying doctor was already in the sky, was being diverted to land at Desperance.

By the time the doctor landed on the bonfire-lit airstrip, Truthful and the sister had Kevin set for an emergency evacuation. Girlie watched helplessly as he was transferred onto a stretcher and taken into the plane, then rehooked to the oxygen cylinder and drip. The sister told her there was no room for her to go. Then the door was closed, and the plane was gone.

So, things went on as they do when the bad things happen, with everyone talking about it like they knew everything. So many private eyes. No one owned up to knowing anything in an official capacity. Didn’t see it. Truthful should have looked. He heard the car go past. The car sounded like a rally car when it ripped up and down the main road. They said, who was going to get up in the middle of the night to look at town louts trying to kill themselves? There were dozens of people involved in the brawl outside the pub, but they all said they were too out of it to notice what was going on really. I was too busy fighting man, but I should’ve seen that car and if I had then I would have killed the bastards. Some people were kind enough to say that.

Others said it was Kevin’s own fault because he was always looking for trouble. And Kevin, any moment he regained consciousness, his eyes looked as though he was looking at a white-fired hell. Sometimes word came back on the grapevine to the family about Kevin’s condition. An old tribal lady, a traditional doctor, went down to see the girls, and she said she had seen him. She said she went to the big hospital, all the time pretending to visit sick relatives from out of town.

They knew she had never left Desperance in her life, but they believed everything she told them. As a gifted ventriloquist she spoke with the voice of a spirit, a guardian angel, who had sat alongside of Kevin’s bed and waited. ‘He tries to scream the word “fire” but he is still running away, still unable to fight the souls of the people who did this to him.’ Girlie, Janice and Patsy existed just to get word from the old woman. They sat in the kitchen, or outside in front of the house waiting to see who would come next to tell them something, and waiting for their two big brothers to come home.

Inso and Donny had left their mine jobs and driven all night over the slippery road in the rain, to get down to the hospital to see Kevin. It was just heartbreaking to sit there and look at him. The brothers sat uncomfortably on either side of the bed in side chairs, in the white painted room. There was not much talking, except about going home, and to offer words of support, just to let Kevin know the big brothers were there. They talked normal, not mucking around talking, but strong talk, nothing’s changed kind of feeling, because they were the big brothers, to let Kevin know, and let him know when nobody else was in the white room checking every five minutes, he would be avenged, total, and sure, to the end.

They tried to avoid looking directly at him, staring instead at the starched white hospital linen, unnerved by the sight of all of the medical equipment which had become a part of him. The machines had dials scratching jagged lines on graph paper. Others had dials which shook while trying to stay in one position, while regulating tubes going in and out of Kevin’s body, wrapped from head to foot in bandages or plaster.

They found they could not communicate anything of how they felt after a few words, so they sat there in silence, pondering who did this to him. Then, Inso or Donny looked at each other and gave the nod to go, so they could talk, and they left. A few hours later, down at the pub, they would use the payphone to call Truthful and ask him, ‘What the bloody hell was going on up there?’ There was no way, they told Truthful, that they believed he was doing everything he could to catch the buggers, ‘Are you?’ Each took the phone in turn to accuse him of protecting the bastards who picked on Kevin. ‘Aren’t you? You moron.’

‘Give me a break,’ Truthful demanded, and told them to keep away because he was pretty close to catching the culprits and he did not want them frightened off and leaving town. ‘Ah! Yeah!’ Donny and Inso replied before hanging up on him, while Truthful was trying to remind them about their jobs at the mine. Truthful was moved to the top of their list of how they were going to deal with everything, once they got home.

‘They’ve still got him on the respirator,’ Truthful told Girlie, the first, second and third day. He kept coming down to the Phantom place expecting sympathy for the huge load on his plate. He still didn’t have a clue who had beaten up Kevin. He and Bruiser were already busy enough investigating Gordie’s death.

‘There can’t be that many hoon cars to look at,’ Girlie clipped in the icy voice she reserved for the world of the incompetent. She was sitting at the kitchen table, arms folded, staring straight into Truthful’s face. The other two sisters sat around the kitchen table as well, their big arms folded, waiting to hear what he had to say.

‘There is no need for the hostilities,’ he replied. ‘You already know I’ve asked everybody in this useless town.’

‘Oh! Yeah!’ Girlie glared, her arms and legs crossed tighter. ‘Well! I don’t think that is good enough. What do you think Janice? Do you think that is good enough? Hey! And what about you Patsy? Don’t you think someone should have been arrested by now? Someone taken in for questioning?’ And she looked straight back at Truthful. Her words were like fired bullets. ‘You were quick smart about finding a few little black boys to arrest for that stupid Gordie. The pimp. He deserved what he got. But what did our Kevin do? What harm did he do to anyone?’

Truthful was fuming, said he thought they were a mob of hypocrites, ‘I seen the way you looked after your brother.’ He dared not mention that two of the little black boys Girlie referred to were her stepbrothers. Not in this house if anyone had any sense.

‘Oh! Really. And how’s that?’ Girlie challenged.

‘Forget it,’ Truthful said, feeling the last thing he needed was to create an enemy out of Girlie right now. He tried to touch her on the arm but she moved away. ‘I don’t know what I am saying half the time. I have had hardly any sleep for days. I got to get some sleep soon or I am going to go mad thinking about what has happened to everybody.’

There was silence in the room. They knew that he was blaming his lack of sleep on Girlie for not letting him stay with her. They kept their mouths shut for a change, because they knew the truth of the matter was otherwise, it was Truthful himself who did not want to stay. Girlie had hissed at her sisters days ago, ‘Said he was too busy. Said he had to guard the prison until he could get some help. Said he had to keep an eye on those boys. Well! That suits me fine, the big ugly bastard, stinking of grog and who knows what. I bet he is molesting those little boys because nobody cares what happens to them.’

The two other sisters had heard rumours many times previously about Truthful, Shh! being bisexual. The boys at the pub talked about it around the pool table in a flippant kind of way. In terms of what they heard had happened to other boys after hours, being picked up on the road by Truthful, or what they thought would happen to them if they ended up locked up for the night. Neither Janice nor Patsy discussed any of these revelations with Girlie, since she was sleeping with him, and maybe she did not want to know, because, surely, she would know. A woman knows.

It was really peculiar how an ordinary house could evoke strange pictures in the loose minds of people. It was really just a simple house. A house built with the hopes of raising a family, Norm Phantom had always claimed, when he talked about his home.

Yet, there are houses, so removed, they have no call for the high moral ground. Such houses are regarded as being so strange, like the Phantom house with its twisty corridor of corrugated iron, it bestowed significant powers in the minds of Uptown. They claimed it would conquer those it conjured into its grasp. Just as Angel’s house exuded lust, Norm Phantom’s evoked terrible fearings of loathing from the great minds, who, like the black cockatoos in flight overhead, only saw it from a distance. People who never came to visit. It made your heart jump. They complained it sent the cold shivers running up and down their spines, just from looking at that sinister fortress of corrugated iron flanked by closed thickets of prickly bush. But they looked from a long way off, at the other end of that long muddy road from town. Crows flew around it at night they claimed. The greatest of all Uptown desires was to have the house and all the prickly bush flattened by a grader. Once and for all.

Everybody watched that black sympathiser Truthful with a close eye, while asking, ‘I wonder what he’s up to now?’ Each morning they saw him drive out of town. Slip sliding like a bat out of hell, there he goes, in broad daylight mind you, driving down to the Phantom’s place, worrying for that young Phantom kid Kevin, even after what happened to Gordie.

‘He should stay away from that place.’ Yes! This was right, people talk. But it seemed the man did not have a thread of respect for himself, for he went straight to the home of the most hated and fearful man in the Gulf, Will Phantom – Wherever he was running amok again, who knows where – and did not care who was watching him. All without a care in the world, even though he knew Will Phantom had dragged the whole town down, when he tried to stop the mine from going ahead. That whole business had caused people to go stark raving mad. A lot of important people in the government said he had no right to do what he had done. Now, the whole world stared at infamous Desperance, and all because Will Phantom could not cop it sweet, his bad luck.

This was the reason why Desperance needed an active policeman, an ideas man, someone like Truthful, who felt this was the big breakthrough in his years in the town. It required a lot of guesswork to know what was going on about the place now. So, since supposition was the prerogative of the police station, it was part of Truthful’s occupation to be Will’s second-guesser. Once Will Phantom heard about Kevin that would be it. He would come there as large as life, reeking for revenge. Truthful secretly surmised in his acts of seducing Girlie, that Will Phantom would not expect anyone to think he would turn up at his father’s house. Truthful thought he possessed a brave idea. He would be waiting when Will arrived. Ideas were very fashionable in Uptown at the moment, and he felt he had his ideas down pat. He was betting his last dollar on it.

The days passed full of cringe for Uptown, winding themselves up by watching Truthful’s mad driving to Norm Phantom’s house. The whole town rested on their fearful beliefs, pondering and waiting for a showdown of sorts. Would Will Phantom pick and choose what goose among them was going to cop it – a house fire, a fight, intimidation, terrorism?

Everyone in town knew the story, that Norm would not have a bar of Will, and so far, he had been the only person who could crush him. He had told the big-head off. He wanted nothing to do with him. Called him a no-good mongrel breed, talking about land rights and all of that crap. Yes! Norm told him what Uptown wanted to say, ‘We don’t want any of that Southern black rights activism stuff up here.’ Would Will Phantom return? Nothing would stop him now his father was away. Truthful did not rate a mention, for nobody would be able to defend themselves against the stash of guns and ammunition everyone knew Will had hidden somewhere in that monstrous tin castle they could see down the road. The great speculation about the explosives and equipment he had in his possession was dragged out of memories, and talked about again with interest bordering on paranoia, with new links to terrorism. There were things missing down at the mine every time there was a stocktake.

Word grew that Will Phantom even knew how to assemble an atomic weapon. He had stolen uranium in the area, from the locked-up mine at Mary Kathleen. He had just slipped over the fence and helped himself. It was idiotic thinking, for it was not possible. The uranium mine of Mary Kathleen, some few hundred kilometres away, was sealed, fenced, locked, and guarded. But who knows? Who knows these things anymore when people are living in such a complex world, and people do not talk, do not negotiate a fair deal, do not live by the rules, and will do anything to get what they want?

Blah! Blah! Blah! So on and so forth. People talked of the many foreign boats mixed up with the mining. They surmised a lot. For who knew what shipload of stuff Will had smuggled from black rights sympathisers, from pirate ships bobbing up and down in the moonlight, just kilometres off the coast? Anything! Anything! Moored there while the stuff was rowed ashore probably. Anyone could see for themselves what was really going on, they claimed. He was going to create his own race war up in the Gulf. Everyone knew that. Knew one had to be very careful with surface appearances, especially with a place like Norm Phantom’s, which could be mighty misleading looked at from the other end of the road.

‘Idiot! Bloody idiot!’ Girlie could churn Truthful around, like wringing him fingers-first through her old Simpson washing machine, while dragging him out at the other end, smack flat and drained. The sisters could tell that she was plain itching to stir him up. Ever since what happened to Kevin, she had become obsessed about old man Joseph Midnight knowing everything. ‘He sees everything! Doesn’t he see everything?’ The hundredth time. Every passing night, for half the night, the two older sisters had listened to her talking about old man Joseph Midnight.

Now, sitting in the kitchen, Janice and Patsy, both with great bags under their eyes and barely mobile because of Girlie’s pacing around during the night, wondered why Girlie, who was so quick to see everything, had not noticed the colour draining from Truthful’s face as she yelled his inadequacies at him, straight across the kitchen table.

Initially, all she wanted to know was whether he was getting any closer to catching those mongrels and when he never answered her, Well! that was that. It was they who had to eventually serve him some food because she refused. ‘Yer can go hungry,’ she claimed, eating in front of him, filling her own big mouth with a half piece of toast at a time. The moon sisters watched his olive-skinned face fade from red, to storm-sea grey. They thought it uncanny how the colour perfectly matched the corrugated-iron walls of the cramped kitchen. ‘Old man Joseph Midnight will be able to tell you, I am telling you,’ Girlie prattled on with a full mouth.

‘Then why don’t you ask him?’ Truthful finally barked at her like a dog breaking into her cruel world. The sweat running down his face sprayed over the table. Girlie jumped out of the way with her plate. She grabbed her cup, grinning now from ear to ear. She had at last found the crack, exposed the wound, forced him to feel her pain. There was no room for little boys around her world. ‘Go, Truthful.’ Thinking he could just suffocate himself with his own tongue which was already swollen up with bundles of lies stuffed inside his mouth. No wonder he could not talk. But Girlie could grab someone’s tongue and shake it around just by using her bare words.

Then, with the bigger sisters sitting and eating, trying to pretend nothing was happening, she noticed he was clamming up again. ‘Anyone hear anything?’ He put his finger to his lips, indicating to Girlie, she should do the same. Truthful looked as though he had seen a ghost. He had seen old man Joseph Midnight coming out of the mud along the side of the road outside of the Phantom place this morning, as he drove down the road. He had been seeing Joseph Midnight sneaking about just about everywhere he looked lately. This morning, the old fella just stood there staring, mud dripping everywhere, and when Truthful looked at him, he told Truthful he was a bloody idiot.

The dismayed sisters sat quietly like little mice sipping tea, and again, were suddenly surprised to notice how his thick lips were trembling, as though he had just come out of a fridge, or was seeing ghosts, or both, and thought, perhaps he had lost his marbles. They kicked polite circumspection reserved for visiting white people out the door, and Patsy and Janice stared straight into his face, to observe his radically changed personality more closely. Only Girlie, continuing on regardless, seemed to be reaching his lost state of mind. Who wouldn’t, with her screaming abuse at them from across the table? The bigger sisters lent in to take an even closer look at his face. His heavy hooded eyelids were twitching uncontrollably as he stared into space past Girlie.

Again, Truthful saw the images which had overtaken his car at dawn. It happened when he had started driving out on their road, and at first, he thought he was losing his eyesight as he stared ahead at the fuzzy, lighter, paler-coloured road and countryside ahead. It looked as though there was a fog ahead, but soon, he discovered it was not a fog at all, only by then, it was too late to turn around. He could clearly see he had driven deep into spider webs as high as the vehicle. A thick sheet of white surrounded him. Perhaps Truthful had never seen such a thing before, but it was an old story that sometimes happens overnight when a cloud of travelling spiders drop onto land from the sea wind, and start building their webs the height of house walls. Ingeniously, the spiders work at night, flying through the air as they attach their silver webs to anything with height: electricity poles, fences, long grass, prickly bush trees. The fat-bellied creatures sat in the middle of their webs, while their long, sinister legs spread like lethal weapons, and looked like stars as big as saucers. He drove on, slowly, foolishly he thought. A multitude of spiders crawled through his brain. He did not know what to do. He could not go back: he did not want to go back. He was locked in: he had to drive forward for there was nowhere else to go, nowhere to turn around.

Without anyone to tell him what to expect, Truthful could never have realised how densely packed together those webs were. The car became thickly coated with layer after layer of the silky, film-like threads. Soon, he saw nothing in the whiteness, except the webs stuck on the windscreen with the angry spiders caught between their nests. There were spiders crawling all over the car and he quickly wound up the windows. He killed those that had got inside with the local telephone book, and within minutes, locked in the airless car and loaded down with humidity, the perspiration started to pour off his body.

He found it difficult to breathe. He panicked, inside his brain he saw millions and zillions of cellular neurons popping around like white baby spiders. The creatures raced into each other, creating old man Joseph Midnight’s face, twisted with anger, staring at him and calling him an idiot, then pulsating away into a void the size of a pin hole, only to be recreated speeding towards him again, even quicker than before.

Another crazy thing happened to Truthful. His body became weightless, and with all his might forcing his fingers which felt like rubber, he held on to the steering wheel, to stop himself from floating away. A lulling voice, whispering inside his head, kept telling his body he was going to die. But dying by asphyxiation was not what his body wanted to do. He struggled against the weightlessness blowing him towards the dead relatives assembled in a little huddle in the flowing white distance.

Remarkably, at this point, fate had a little something to give Truthful. His body repulsed the ailing brain. The energy must have come out of his soul, for his hands locked like clamps around the steering wheel, and his feet turned into flattened lead on the floor of the car. His left foot was still planted on the accelerator, and he literally flew out of that road.

Normally, Truthful would have agreed with Girlie. If you ever want to find out about anything in your vicinity, you have to talk to the mad people. She had always said this, although more often in the previous days: ‘They know the deepest and darkest secrets of this place.’ But nobody knew what Joseph Midnight knew, and everyone knew what Girlie would never know. It was an eye for an eye. A black for a white. It was just starting. The fathers of those louts who bashed Kevin were openly boasting to Uptown about putting a nigger down for Gordie. Kevin was paying for the memories, for being smart once, from a family with airs about themselves, for Will Phantom. Open slather, open slather, came the whispered words which kept repeating themselves when he picked up the phone in the middle of the night, while another voice gave the warning, Stay out of it Truthful, it’s open slather now.

Truthful knew that after the attack on Kevin, no one was really interested in harming the three petrol sniffers accused of killing Gordie. Why would they bother with kids who had cooked their brains so badly they felt nothing? Truthful knew most of the town did not even think the petrol sniffers had it in them to go and kill Gordie. But! It did not stop there. The phone at the police station rang all hours of the night and day, a different whispering voice most of the time, with more warnings, You come near our boys and we will hang you. A chill ran down his spine every time the phone rang. At night, he lay in the darkness thinking how the town had managed to mould him into the shape they needed, so he had nothing to fall back on when something like this happened. Nothing could happen: that was the dilemma. This was it. End of story now.

On one of the nights following the arrest of the boys and the incident with Kevin, Truthful had just started to settle down again after the phone had stopped ringing for the last time. Sleep drifted in and he started to dream. In the dream he heard someone knocking on the door, but he decided not to answer, until the knocking grew so loud, he went to the door to see who it was.

He turned the lights on and stood at the doorway looking at the rose garden, deep red roses were blooming, but to his surprise, there was nobody there. When he looked past the darkness to the streetlights on the other side of the road, he saw stray dogs sniffing the rubbish bins. He glanced over the town, just to check whose lights were still on, to pin down where the nuisance phone callers could be coming from. He made a mental note of those houses where lights were shining. He was half asleep, yet he walked around the yard, checked his car was locked, and went back inside, closed the door, flicked the light switch, and turned around.

The only reason he was able to see in the darkened office was because there was moonlight shining through the windows. The police station was full with Aboriginal people crowding through the building. He became very frightened. Their skin was grey. Whenever he blinked, the place seemed to become more crowded. He stayed pressed against the door. He thought if he were to move, the people might see him. There were so many jostling bodies, jammed up against him, that he could feel the closeness of grey shoulders under his nose, and see that the shiny greenish substance covering their skin was a sea slime that felt cold and sticky whenever the jostle accidentally bumped into his face and arms.

The smell of the sea was never far away in Desperance. Except during the Dry, when the sea returned to its normal shoreline some twenty-five kilometres away. Even then, the breeze carted its fish smells back to town. Now, Truthful smelt it like old dead fish guts. He remembered his Italian Mama’s stories about the ghosts of dead people coming to haunt you.

Moments later, in panic and with a racing heart, Truthful thought, What of his prisoners, the three boys? ‘Excuse me! Excuse me!’ He found himself speaking as though he was a ghost himself. He pushed, shoved, inched his way through the throng, thinking faster and faster, if the boys could see them too, then maybe, he was not dreaming. It felt like an eternity to reach the back of the building to the cells. ‘Excuse me! Excuse me!’ Slowly, like a cloud moving, the grey spirits drifted aside.

‘What say they are not alright?’ Truthful started to become worried about the boys. He could not move fast enough now. Tristrum and Luke Fishman, aged ten and twelve. Aaron Ho Kum, aged eleven. When the flogging stopped, they had scooted under the table away from Bruiser, and huddled against the back wall, petrified, waiting, for the screaming might come back and take them again. Truthful felt his thoughts thrown through the air by a huge force, crushing back at him through a million possibilities he kept rejecting, saying: ‘They are alright.’

Luke was the oldest, and he tore the T-shirts into strips, tied the knots, and carefully examined whether each length would be long enough. The other two boys watched his hands work in the moonlight and said nothing, and then he had everything prepared. They just followed Luke into the darkness and into the light beyond, up on the blue sea, swimming under a cloudless summer sky. Truthful believed he could have reached them in seconds but his body was lead, his head was like the sedentary oleander beside the jail, betrayed by his mind. It was betrayal all round. The boys were dead. Their shredded T-shirts were the first thing he saw. Three strands hanging taut from the cross bar at the top of the bars across the front of their cell. ‘Say it’s not true,’ Truthful said, speaking to the spirits, and just as suddenly as he had been alone before, he was alone again. There was nothing in the building but emptiness and silence.

The only sound was the high tide lapping on the beach. It did not seem possible that they could have hung themselves. The cell was not high enough and when he saw their feet slumped on the floor, he could not imagine how they could have done this to themselves. Yet nobody had come into the building. He would have known. They were sleeping on the floor when he checked before going to bed. Now they were dead, and he preferred to believe the opposite, and cried out to them: ‘You are tricking me.’ He checked each of their wrists for a pulse, and in resignation, closed their vacant eyes. Still, he was hopeful, he thought they were children. Children playing a game, ‘Come on,’ he said, and there was the usual, useless shaking for life to come back.

Now, he could not remember if he had checked the cells before going to bed. Of course he had. Didn’t he always make the last check on the cells, even when they were empty? He was not sure anymore. Perhaps it had been the day before. Or the day before that. He ran to his desk to check his records. Thank God, he thought, the records were there. He had been checking, but still, he doubted himself. This time he had trouble pushing away the thought that he had falsified the records. He told himself he was only creating misunderstandings. Very much on duty, he went back to the cells and took the boys down. One by one he placed them back on the floor where they had been sleeping the last time he saw them. It had only been an hour ago. He would have known. Three people living under the same roof cannot die without you knowing it. Things were going to be better in the morning, he promised. ‘What a breakfast.’ A feast he would prepare for his boys with his own two hands.

‘There’s his car now,’ the gossipy people were gathered in a kind of protest on the corner next to the Fisherman’s Hotel, and were looking across the street at the police station. There were big-bodied people standing in the hot morning, with skins becoming redder, and every now and again, another would announce that for no reason, he had felt the cold shivers. Then others would announce how they felt faint. It was hard waiting when there was an awful stench coming from the police station, drifting down the street and all over town.

‘He mustn’t have a sense of smell,’ said Carmen, the middle-aged, tightly permed blonde proprietor of the fish and chip shop situated right next to the police station. ‘And did you hear the dogs howling?’ Who hadn’t heard the dogs howling all night! They never stopped howling. Carmen had been complaining of the stench of something dead coming from the police station for days. She felt vindicated now that other people felt the same way she did. It was Carmen who started the street-corner protest when she came across the street to the pub and told Bruiser to tell that Truthful to clean the place up, before she made a formal complaint to the Council.

Inside the police station, Truthful was in another world. It looked like he could flip in any direction. Old man Joseph Midnight came along, and said he had looked through the window across the road, and seen that idiot cleaning around his jail all fastidiously, looking after the three little petrol sniffers, who were already dead. Nobody heard what Midnight said, since nobody ever paid him any attention. Midnight said he had seen four hot dinners sitting on the policeman’s special table, which he had moved into the cell for them. Their food was still steaming on the plates.

When Bruiser finished his last glass of beer for the morning, he went outside the pub, stretched himself, and yawned as though he were a bear coming out of its den. He told Carmen and her street-corner gang that he was going over to the station to check on the situation. Three times he knocked on the door and everyone could hear him as plain as day, but Truthful did not answer. Undeterred, Bruiser walked back across the street, said nothing, got into his car, and completed a mud spraying wheelie right across to the police station. This time he did not knock. He just walked straight in after his rifle blew the lock clean off the door.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ he asked Truthful, after he walked in and saw what the cop was doing. Truthful did not answer, he was in a daze. Bruiser very quickly understood that the man was off with the pixies – tending dead bodies like that. He stood well back, sickened with the overpowering smell of death. Trying to stay calm, he watched Truthful moving each stiffened body. He was moving the boys from their upright position, leaning against the front part of the chairs where they had been arranged around the dinner table, and carrying them, one by one, back to their bunks, where he gently placed a blanket over each.

‘They are dead man. How come they are dead?’ Bruiser knew he had made a mistake as soon as he had spoken.

Truthful just stared blankly at the floor with a smile on his face.

Bruiser smiled weakly too, in case Truthful noticed him before he had a chance to get out of the building. He tried to be quiet, like a mouse, without making any sudden noise to upset him. He could hear his heart thumping like a drum. Relieved he had reached the door in one piece, he closed it quietly behind him. He got back into his car and completed a second wheelie back to the pub, and went straight inside, without saying a word to Carmen and the gang who had followed him.

‘They are all dead. All of them. ’Cept Truthful. He’s gone stark raving mad. Give us a drink will ya?’

‘Can’t be.’ Someone whispered.

‘The smell inside, man, it was that strong I am telling you, I thought I was going to pass out. Hurry up with that drink Lloydie.’ Bruiser began telling everyone crowding around him what he had seen. They watched him spitting out his words as though he wanted to be rid of the shock as quickly as possible. Lloydie Smith, with detached face, placed a large glass of beer down on the bar. Bruiser swallowed it with a single gulp.

‘Can’t be,’ someone kept whispering. All of the people gathered in the bar had anxiously cushioned themselves around Bruiser, not wanting to miss a word of the terrible things he had seen. Ignoring them, and speaking directly to Lloydie, Bruiser said his head felt like a merry-go-round. It seemed life was not spinning fast enough, for with resignation and loss in his voice, he claimed, ‘They were catching me.’ This was the best way to explain what he preferred to have kept to himself. The fact that as he was backing out of the police station, he saw the three boys running after him. ‘Watch out,’ Bruiser whimpered. The words escaping from his mouth surprised everyone listening, including himself. A tighter circle formed around him and he thought he was going to faint. The cool draughty breeze hit everyone in the face. A loud thumping noise filled the bar room, the sound of all their hearts beating loudly.

‘You are going to die for this,’ Bruiser whispered, dragging Lloydie closer by his T-shirt, so he could speak softly into his ear. Lloydie looked shocked, for what he had heard was the thin voice of a boy coming out of Bruiser’s mouth. Everyone heard Bruiser speak like a boy and thought it was a horrible miracle. ‘How could this be happening?’ Carmen nudged someone close beside her. Those boys were working like angels – it was the only way of explaining it in the white man’s tongue. But it was nothing to be frightened about, because their poor little spirits had gone to the sea and you would see them down there playing in the surf, juggling fish above their heads, if you caught them on a lucky day. Nothing was going to touch them now.

‘Stop it mate. Pull yourself together because this is going to get very, very bad. If we don’t deal with it quickly,’ Lloydie spoke to Bruiser, his voice low. ‘Ignore it,’ he encouraged, for he had done this at times himself to shake off the spirits. Bruiser started shaking his own head as though this would free him from whatever it was that was bothering him. Lloydie stared at the bar, startled, then Bruiser decided to beat it with his fists, as if this would help too. It soon came to the point where Lloydie must have cracked too, for he did a most unusual thing. He hit Bruiser in the mouth with his bony fist. The impact shocked everyone. Lloydie was shocked himself.

Just when Lloydie thought he was going to be paid back, the mayor turned around and said with a grin, he needed it. ‘Thank God he’s normal again,’ piped Carmen. ‘Get on the phone, and get Valance to come over here,’ Bruiser ordered Lloydie. The first time, Lloydie dialled nervously, and had trouble dialling the right number. He tried again, while everyone waited to hear the phone ringing in the Council office, on the other side of the street.

It seemed like an eternity before Valance arrived, after being watched by the entire pub as he ambled across the road. ‘Valance! Truthful’s gone stark raving mad. You know that?’ Bruiser hollered at Valance as soon as he appeared in the pub. ‘He has locked himself inside the police station, with the dead petrol sniffers. The three boys are dead.’ Valance did not bat an eyelid at the news. He had heard the flogging from the Council office. ‘Now,’ Bruiser continued haltingly, trying to think, while waving his hand from side to side, to brush off Valance’s attempts to speak, ‘we got to be darn clever about this. The cop is likely to kill someone the way he is, I am telling you.’

Again, Valance tried to speak, but Bruiser, pausing to think, waved his hand between them. Soon, he detailed the plan to capture Truthful. ‘What you have to do, use the phone here and get someone to round up all the workers, and tell them to get here and bring their rifles, or whatever they got. Tell them, don’t worry about the gun laws. We know they’ve still got their rifles. We got to sort out what’s happening over at the station there with the cop, before there is any more bloodshed.’ Valance responded indifferently, taking his time. His soul was nothing now but deep hatred. It walked with hate towards Bruiser but not with Valance alongside, because the shame of it was that Valance knew he could not kill Bruiser.