The vehicles left the lagoon in the early morning under Mozzie’s orders. He had sent Angel Day with them. Several of his men were given strict instructions to take Angel to any large city in the South where she would stay. ‘And you must try to be happy,’ he told her as a parting gesture of goodwill, although she replied that she had no intention of being told to be happy. After the proverbial dust had settled, he told her, as she finally stepped into a waiting car, he would come by. ‘Such is life,’ she sighed. With not one tear left to fall on a soaked hankie, only a premonition that her life was to be one squalid mess of moving between overcrowded houses from this point on, she resigned herself to a flicker of hope, because Mozzie solemnly promised as soon as he thought it was safe, he would arrange for her to go home.
The whole convoy was ordered by the Fishman to take a route into a winter of nowhere. ‘Break up – as soon as you can,’ he ordered. ‘Do not go home.’ He used many words to describe their new identities. They should become anonymous reformers with the run and mill. Blend. ‘Only regroup,’ he said, when his word arrived and some day surely, it would. These were his strict instructions. More homilies followed like prayers so the men would never forget that only by following the Fishman’s word, letter for absolute letter, did any of them have a chance of invisibility.
‘Follow me,’ he warned with his one stern eye. ‘Or else cop the consequences.’
Well! That was that then. Consequences meant remembering how fish could get caught up in all kinds of nets, and you would know whose plate you were going to land on if you were regarded as being the criminal type of fish. ‘Be perfectly assured,’ his warnings kept flowing, adding reasons because he liked reasons, in the belief that a leader could not have enough reasons stored up in his brainbox.
‘I am not talking about that useless, invisible Desperance kinda net, I am talking about the real ones, just as invisible, thrown out by the police who are wanting to squash people like you, like you is merely a nuisance of a mosquito.’ He was still explaining his reasons, while one by one, the men got into their vehicles with whatever gear they owned, and drove off along the slow, difficult curvilinear road out of the valley, to the long, hard, short-cut roads into desert locations, so as to be gone from memory as though they had never existed.
At last, the Fishman caught the first glimpse of the red-dust-covered men with their red watery eyes emerging from the bush after they had travelled by foot over thirty kilometres from the mine site. One after the other they fell on the ground where he was waiting and for a while, they all lay there exhausted, breathing heavily, saying nothing at all until finally, a voice rose from the mass of dust and smoke of panting bodies to say two words, ‘Done boss.’ The Fishman simply nodded as if there was little satisfaction to be gained from his one big day on earth. He nodded, as he went around solemnly patting each man on the back. Minutes later, the young men moved away and into the ghostly grey and red-streaked lagoon waters, breaking through the thin coating of dust and ash to uncover the fresh, cool water beneath.
‘Where’s Will?’ the Fishman asked, looking around. He knew he was not there, but he completed a headcount anyway. From the water, the men looked back to the still ash-covered bush on the other side of the lagoon. It looked as though no man had ever walked through there, and it seemed unlikely anyone else would. Yet, the men were certain they had seen the two young blokes setting off to the lagoon with Will. ‘We saw the three of them going ahead before any of us, we told them boss, “Take Will up ahead in case of any trouble”. But it was useless explaining. There was so little time to lose, and they still had some burying to do.
This was what went wrong. Slowly, the report was given. A map was drawn of the location in the mud at the edge of the lagoon. Two crosses on the ground marked where the two mine men guarding Will had fallen.
‘Afterwards, after the explosions, we had to wait see, then we, a few of us, went back to find the bodies of those two.’
It was true; the men had dared to face the scorching heat where the devil had just passed. They had returned to the flat, walking through the burning spinifex, trying to locate the bodies in the heat but had to leave quickly.
‘Look boss, there was no way we could find them. We went straight to the places where we saw them go down, the bastards, and they weren’t there. They were gone. Abracadabra! Zoom. Disappeared into thin air.’
‘How could flesh and blood disappear into thin air?’ A sceptical Fishman eyeballed the tall-yarn spinners.
‘What we were saying: we thought the ground swallowed them up and they went rolling down to hell. After we heard the explosion, we looked all around the ground with one second, that’s all we had, true God. Even in that time I swear to God, we never seen anything like it. The ground started to come at us, like the skin of a wild animal rippling up and down as it is running along, with rocks jumping everywhere. Behind the ground moving, the dirt and rock went flying everywhere. Well! We had to duck for cover after that. We were flat on the ground and all we felt was movement underneath us, like the devil was coming up to the surface.
‘And he was accompanied by the sound of the devil’s orchestra playing the horrible, sizzling music of hell by thumping their own heads together – Bang! Bash! Bang! We never heard anything like it. The sound was so terrible, we knew it could only be the sound of damnation. The only thing must have happened, the explosion lifted them up first, threw them to kingdom come, and when they fell, the devil took one quick look and said, “Curry them in hell, the buggers”. Or, it could have been, they got buried themselves.’
The tellers of tall stories were given a cursory glance by Mozzie as he continued fidgeting with his hands, twiddling his thumbs in circles, as though the action would conjure the simple truth out of a gammon story. But in the scheme of things, it did not really matter who was telling the truth. Hey! Yo! Why tempt fate? No one here was going back anyway. Wishes were the only thing left. A simple wish was all anyone could ask: that wherever they fell, nobody would find the bodies until they were well and truly gone. Whispering again. Such a truthful mind running nilly-pilly, and so little control over his speech.
Mozzie turned his gaze back through the rustling tree spirits to a spot where it seemed they were beckoning him to look, and he saw another truth in the blackened landscape. It was a truth he had seen earlier, as he looked towards the mine, at what had become of normality, as a spectator of this thing they called hell, and seen the devastation over the hills. Now he saw the real immensity of what had happened in front of him, as if the only purpose of such a miracle was to brand him, small and inferior. Blown bits of rose-coloured human flesh, amidst burnt black cinders, had fallen onto the ground. At that moment, seeing what he had, he wished it undone, but the terrible truth did not yield to the wish of a simple man.
A fortune-teller’s time sped fast over the same ground where dingos, prowling in the middle of the night after he and his men had gone, were taking whatever remained of those people, scattered over the plains, before running and snivelling back to their rocky lairs inside the hills of the great spirit. A tragedy kept unfolding, and he, unable to acknowledge his culpability, wished to hide in the smallness of men. He chose. He would not see the extremity of his weakness, nor claim it straightaway: he referred time elsewhere. The Fishman felt a dull pain again, pulling his heart apart. The indecision was breaking him in two. Now, he was uncertain if he should believe in his safe vision of what had really happened. Did he need to know the truth? But the truth was, there would be no going back.
Then, while the dark clouds of the Gulf crawled by, darkening the already hazy atmosphere, and cloud bellies touched the tops of the again windy bush, the attention was drawn of a young turk with the very best eyes, and respect for all religionalities among them, who yelled out in a rasping voice like a Christian crusader, ‘In kingdom come, thy will be done. Thank the Lord, here they come!’
The Fishman peered over the rims of his sunglasses, and it was true whether from his good eye or the glass one, for the young followers were running, and others followed through the swaying branches of the spearwood trees. They were coming alright. The Rasta boys, under ash, with Will Phantom stumbling along, half dragged by the sheer willpower of the Rastafarian god men.
Privately to the Fishman, the two young men, still winded by their efforts to return to the camp, explained in his ear what had happened. ‘We come along, like you said, and we are saying, “We are bringing the Fishman’s gift of life”.’ They said they believed Will Phantom was just a man wishing to die. ‘You better off watching him. He’s got a death wish. A date with death. Can’t stop him.’
‘We should have left him there.’ The young blokes complained in a haughty manner, although suffering from smoke inhalation which hampered them from talking more, and burns. Will lay on the ground in front of them. Explaining their difficulties, they said, ‘We could have been killed a half-a-dozen times because of him.’
‘We want you to know he doesn’t listen to a fucking thing.’
Finally, they explained how he went back, they had to chase after him, while he looked for the two dead men from the mine. ‘We were nearly half baked alive, crawling on our bellies through a bloody spinifex inferno. You couldn’t breathe nothing but fire, all the while, trying to pull him out of there.’ Finally, exhausted, the two young men ceased talking. Ignoring the Fishman, and bending over with their hands on their knees, trying to catch their breathe, both cast a hostile glance over at Will.
‘Yeah! Yeah!’ The Fishman hurried them along, anxious to hear what else they had to say.
‘We found the buggers dead of course. We dragged them out of there, with clumps of spinifex exploding into flames everywhere you looked, and the bloody fire, chasing us.’
‘And!’
‘They are just over there.’ One of the lads indicated across the lagoon with a hand he barely lifted from his knee. ‘And we aren’t touching em again, neither.’ Fishman went over to Will and gave him a fatherly pat on the back. ‘Good job lad.’ He got him some water, then called some of the men to go and bring the bodies back from the bush. Soon enough, the two charred bodies were laid out at the feet of the Fishman.
‘I guess we had better bury them,’ he decided. ‘We better get to work and bury them. Over there in the bush,’ he said finally, looking back towards the road.
‘No, we are not, we are not burying them at all.’ The Fishman looked around on hearing Will speak, and saw him standing, completely covered in ash, dust and congealed blood, but there was no doubt, it was the familiar Will Phantom’s easy stance. On first glance the Fishman was reminded of Norm some thirty years ago, standing in front of him with the same ease: calling it quits to their dual leadership on the religious road.
‘You remember Elias’s boat?’ Will spoke quietly into Fishman’s ear – lest the wind heard and told the trees.
Fishman nodded, remembering the unpleasant, hot day they had found poor, old Elias, sitting out there in the middle of the lagoon, and thinking he was there fishing, but knowing that dead men don’t fish.
‘Well! What do you think, hey? If we get that boat from up the hill over there, and we leave those two there for the crows to feed on?’ Will talked on. He took no notice of the look of concern growing on the Fishman’s face.
The older man had shocked himself, when he unwittingly looked inside the charred skin of the two broken bodies that had been dragged one way or the other through hell. There, their spirits lay, unable to move, as though locked in limbo, and from their heads stared frightened eyes which jumped left and right at every rustle in the bush to which Will wanted to condemn them. Instantly, deep sorrow moved Mozzie to forget his own grievances and to make a sober decision. There was no thirst for revenge. Whatever it was, was quenched. He had no mind left for the callousness of Will. Instead, he replied, ‘We going to bury em decent. Decent. You understand me Will?’
‘No, I respect you. You are the boss, but I got to do this,’ Will replied just as determinedly. ‘They killed Elias. Left him here like he was just fish bait, and, yesterday! Yesterday they killed Hope. These bastards threw her out of the helicopter. And now, I don’t know for sure, but they might have killed Bala as well. So, I am going up there to get Elias’s boat, even if I got to do it myself, and I am going to leave them there to rot, until they are found by the people over there at the mine.’
‘Eye for an eye is it Will?’
‘Yeah! From now on it is.’
‘You know what will happen if you leave them in the boat, don’t you? Their ghosts will come haunting you whenever you are in the water. Leave them in a boat and they will come rowing over any sea and throw evil at you until they kill you. So, now I am telling you no more. You listen to me. You got to bury them decently, no matter what they did.’
‘I couldn’t care less. You will have to kill me first before you bury them in our sacred country. If they got holy country somewhere for killers, well let the mine take them there and bury them themselves. This is our own sanctified country, not theirs. They got no place here.’
‘Alright, have it your way, it’s your life. But I am warning you. You’d be better off picking your targets. Leave no tracks and biding your time. What can I tell you? I am only an old man. No use listening to me. What can I do? I got my only sons plus one other little fella I didn’t even know, to bury.’
Will looked on sympathetically while the Fishman continued talking, now that he was able to tell someone what had happened in Desperance. He recalled how the convoy had arrived at the lagoon, and while they were coming in, he was naming who came in which cars. He had been taking careful note of who was driving, their driving ability, and the condition of the car. Everyone had set up camp at the lagoon, and finally now the spirit trees knew who was there, you could see something was wrong in how they were dancing when the wind started to blow up suddenly like a telephone was ringing.
‘It was a bad business what happened next. There was only a wind talking through the trees, that was all, then all of a sudden, everyone was saying, ‘What’s that? Sounds like engine noise.’ Everyone was a bit worried because we know the sound our cars make.
‘Anyway, a late car turned up. Seventies model Holden station wagon rode in flat chat, “Look out,” reckless driver and all, coming down the road into the lagoon. Did it belong to the convoy everyone was asking, and I said, no it did not. I knew who it belonged to, it belonged to the family of that silly, old troublemaker – Joseph Midnight, same man. So, I said to Midnight’s car, when it pulled up in front of everyone and before anyone could get out, “You got no respect coming in here like this. I don’t like what you are doing here,” I told them.’
Will perfectly understood the significance of this story because everyone knew that old man Joseph Midnight and the Fishman had nothing to do with each other. Both were like his own father Norm Phantom. Stubborn old mules who anchored their respective clans in the sordid history of who really owned different parcels of the local land. Fishman claimed the lagoon, and not just the lagoon either. The old war went right up the coastline to Desperance and out to sea. Will remembered hearing the Fishman explaining that he was the living bible of all times. ‘I am pointing to my brain,’ he said, pushing his fingers into his head. ‘Inside here is the whole history of your government. I can tell you if everything is correct, right back to when time began, before Adam and Eve. I can tell you perfectly for four hundred years, the Midnight people have been doing the wrong thing.’ The Fishman had taken Will Phantom out to the spinifex where the mine was to be built. Following the old man’s yellow cat eyes, Will watched the warring spirits falling from the skies in the middle of the night to fight on the flat lands until close to dawn, before fading away. ‘I see everything,’ the old man said with the utmost sincerity in his voice. ‘And you come along with me and I will show you because I have been alive forever.’
When the mine was built it exacerbated the situation because it created a window of opportunity for Joseph and his family to start making Native title claims over the area. So, Fishman said, he told Joseph to his face, ‘If I see you anywhere around the lagoon I will kill you with a spear.’ Old Norm did not get involved in the dispute but Will remembered him still, slinging on about those greedy Midnight pigs, ‘trying to justify whatever’, in a long-forgotten string of accounts to justify the family feud. The whole lifestyle of old Joseph Midnight’s family grew into one sick family joke about pigs slopping around in their sty, waiting for scraps from the mine.
‘So, I told them Midnight boys before they had a chance to get out of the car – “You got no ceremony here. You got to go back to your own country. Joseph Midnight’s country is a long way off to the West somewhere, salt water and water buffalo where the wild people are living. Go and fight them if you are looking for trouble and you might get lucky enough to get your land back”.’
Even in the light of a quarter moon, the Fishman said he was smart enough to see the frightened looks in the eyes of the young men, so, even while thinking he was getting soft in the head, he let them talk. A young voice from inside the car finally spoke. ‘Don’t get hot under the collar, old man, we will be going. Grandfather sent us to tell you something and we are sorry to have to be the ones that’s got to say any bad news to you.’
Will understood when the Fishman paused in this story of his to talk about his premonitions before leaving Desperance. He said he was no angel, but he was listening to the sound of angels singing like when you feel something bad is about to happen. All the way, while driving down to the lagoon, Fishman said he did not know what it was, but his mind was in overdrive, waiting for something to happen. As he became trapped in the quagmire of his imagination, he said he had tried to gasp one single image, but the kaleidoscope refused to come into focus.
‘It had to be in one of the cars – it was so close,’ he said of the sensation which gripped his mind and was, by now, all over the place. All he could think was that one of the cars in the convoy was about to roll. ‘I stopped the cars must of been ten times, got out, and told them off for not driving more carefully.’ Every car kept slipping through his mind, while he was trying to figure out who the spook was, not driving his car properly.
‘Imagine that!’ he spoke quietly. ‘But it was too hard, I couldn’t see it because I had no faith in my own premonitions. They were the last ones – my own flesh and blood. It was why I could not see them, could not explain, could never picture their future, because they never had one. Poor little boys.
‘So, the voice says to me, “The cop killed them, maybe. Maybe, Bruiser, too, because they both flogged them really terrible”. Well! I know what Bruiser is like. And you know too that town has gotten worse since the mine came. Killed three little boys, babies really, my kids. Stupid Gordie the reason being, although you can’t really blame him can you? Poor thing. I had to think then. Think about what was happening here. Think about why. Why my sons, and not theirs, killed for nothing? I kept thinking it was strange how things were starting to happen around here – all since the mine. Strange, how ordinary people were getting killed, I thought. Innocent people like children. My children. First time I can ever remember, when I did not know what would happen from one day to the next. We always used to know when somebody got killed. Know it. What happened. So, I said to myself, where did it all start? First time, when they got rid of Elias, because he was your friend.’
Will nodded, and listened while the Fishman continued, reflecting on his story. They walked into the bush and finally, they were standing next to the three small bodies wrapped with blankets. ‘Bruiser, it had to be Bruiser,’ he said.
‘I think Bruiser killed Gordie because he started to be too efficient at his job. Gordie must have had something on Bruiser, so he killed him, then he got the boys to make it look like they did it. I had those Midnight boys out of the car. My blokes dragged them out and made them talk. Well! They knew nothing about anything it seemed. They said nobody knew why anyone wanted to kill Gordie and everyone thought the boys did it. But you know Will, I know they never did it. I wasn’t much of a Father, but they couldn’t have killed anyone.
‘Well! Anyhow, I let those Midnight boys go home. Shouldn’t have. They were pleading to join up with the convoy but I wouldn’t let them. I told them, “I got no use for any of you so you may as well go back to your grandfather”. All I could think of was the amount of trouble they would be on the road. I told them to go back to Desperance, but they said their grandfather had told them to keep going. He said Desperance was no place for young boys anymore. They said they were leaving forever. They were heading South.’
The Fishman said he had selected a dozen young men to stay behind while he had the convoy move out and told them, ‘Even if I don’t get through, don’t survive this, the story has to go on. Nothing must stop our stories, understand?’ He turned away from the three bundles lying on the ground, and, as they walked back to the waiting men, Mozzie kept talking.
‘I sent men out to the mine with my orders, then two young fellas come flying back with news, “Our Will’s over there”. That was alright, I sent them back to get you out, same time. The rest of us, we went back to Desperance then, travelling slow and easy, not looking like we were on the warpath with anyone. Silently, like mice, we drove into Desperance, two cars in the middle of the day, driving up the main street.
‘The whole place was deserted. No one took any notice what we were doing about the place. They probably are still trying to figure out what happened. We knew where they’d be alright. All Uptown was inside the pub meeting, like they always have a nice meeting together. Having a meeting, when they want to talk about something, like cleaning up all the rubbish in the town – like talking about us mob.
‘Well! I said I wanted to be a fly on the wall, and I was, so I heard them. They was all there, jammed in like sardines, and they were trying to figure out what to do about Truthful going mad inside the jail. So, I decided we would take Truthful too. But he was already dead. His rope was still swinging. Sill warm. We take my boys and the other little one as well, and all very quietly, we just slowly drove away and they were still having their meeting.’
Will searched, perhaps half expecting to see the body of Truthful somewhere in the spearwood, or where the crows were perched in the branches breathing in the odours of death, or where the files were buzzing, but he only saw the black cloud of swarming flies hovering around the bodies of the blondie and his mate Cookie. Where was he? Will thought, still shocked at what Mozzie had said. But he could see nothing. Fishman thought he had better explain. ‘Don’t bother looking around for him. They asked, “You going to bring im too?” Meaning Truthful. And I said, “No way am I going to bring im down here”. His type don’t belong on our religious ground, anywhere near my boys – let them rest in peace. So, don’t go looking because you will never find him here. We left him in Bruiser’s house – that’s where he is. Sat him up to go cold on Bruiser’s personal reclining chair, waiting for Bruiser to come home, singing some old Dean Martin song. Bruiser was going to be hearing that song forever, haunting him, whispering in his ears when he is lying down sleeping in his bed, for the rest of his life. No, I told the men, “Let them look after their own, and we will look after ours”.’
Fishman said his last words about what happened in Desperance. ‘We never killed Truthful, and he never killed himself either, just like the boys never killed themselves. They were all killed by other hands, just like Gordie, and Elias. The mine made killers Will, and now I’ve made the mine go away. May the great spirit show us some mercy one day, that is all I say.’
So, so, on Cloud Nine…
The men, signalled with flicking fingers by the Fishman, worked quickly with Will to bring Elias’s boat down from the hills. It was not that they wanted to waste time helping Will Phantom’s craziness. What did they have in common with someone wanting to extract some weird kind of revenge? The scum of the earth lying flat out on the ground as dead as? These were nothing more than a couple of charred corpses that should be buried with as much decency as the next person.
Grumbling all the time about being used, like they were anyone’s, they thought they were something else now; a huge metamorphosis had taken place. In their new grandeur which felt like infinity, it was as plain as day that a special something had been defined out of their ‘what for?’ kind of half life, in so-called normal society. Their heads swelled with a greatness comparable to the once biggest mine of its type in the world, which they had conquered. It was as though the mine’s greatness had been pasted on their identity. It felt like they were on Cloud Nine. Now, revelling in the Star Wars theme tune, which they were softly humming as jives to each other, these vigilantes were oscillating on the knife edge of some kind of madness in the ‘belly of the big fish’, where nothing could be assumed normal, and helping Will! Well! It felt like it was blunting the edge of their mania, and they did not feel this should be happening to them.
So, the men of Cloud Nine worked like a pile of snakes, dragging the only concrete memory of Elias, old Choice, through the woodlands and rocks like a piece of Desperance backyard junk. The skip skidded through the unyielding, thick, skin-stabbing twiggy scrub. Their styleless contribution of labour, together with their noisy skylarking full of curses and bad language, had scared the living daylights out of hundreds of scavenger crows perched in the scrub. The birds soared straight up into the red ochre clouds, squawking and carrying on throughout their hurried flight, while others, appearing from out of nowhere, flew in untidy flocks to land. Clouds of birds fought each other for places to perch on the spindly dry branches which in all of the kerfuffle, snapped off close to the ears of the men who became so anxious to leave, they quickened their pace, until they saw the full red sun.
When all is said and done, none of these men had a wish to run about with death. Death had its own air, and in this red haze, that unworldly air sang long, sacred vowels across the land. And while Mozzie’s men ran quicker to be away, they heard things they had never heard before. The ghostly poem, summoning the spirit tribes, swept past them as they moved down into the battleground of the spinifex flats. The ode unfolded seasons and months of wind, rain, storm, sun, night owl, swarming flying ants, crows, eagles, dingos, dung beetles, flies, and fish spawning. All came in droves to claim the unprotected spirit until only bare, bleached bones remained.
‘Be careful with that boat,’ Will demanded.
‘What for?’ came the reply. ‘It aren’t that anyone will be using it again.’
‘That’s not the point,’ Will snapped. It was not worth wasting words explaining family sentiment to the Fishman’s men.
Once the green boat was moored on the shore again, Fishman came along to have a last glance at the killers. Above, a dark cloud of sentinel flies – dart, dart, darting to and fro – pestered their eternal rest. He looked at the dead men’s spirits pleading to be released from inside the decaying bodies. With a deadpan expression on his face, everyone could see for themselves that he had lost interest in pleading clemency for them with Will.
Within seconds, the men had plucked the two dead killers from the ground. ‘Okay boss? Heave Ho!’ They laid Chuck and Cookie in the boat, side by side, without shedding a tear in mourning. Fishman looked, grunted his disapproval through clenched teeth stained with rolled tobacco, then turned his back and walked away. The men continued the task without thought, and anchored the boat out there, fully exposed, by throwing a rock attached to a rope over the cathead, into the middle of the lagoon.
Fishman led the way with a long stick, pushing along an ancient path invisible to the naked eye, heading through the foothills. Unquestioningly, instinctively, he was following a map etched on his mind from the times of the many fathers’ fathers before him. The men followed in his footsteps, each sending off little bubble clouds of thoughts into the wind, thoughts of faraway places, of people and noise, children laughing, and dogs running down the road to see the convoy leaving. They threaded through golden papery grasses rustling with white flower tips, through flowing green-gold spinifex whispering through waving coolabah branches, and silent rock faces of red granite, white quartz, white-grey quartzite, all looking down, watching a funeral procession for the children who marked a full stop in history.
All three boys were wrapped in new, red tartan blankets bound with rope. Inside the blankets, Fishman had covered each of the boys with bunches of a leafy aromatic herb that grew wild in flat clumps over the red land. The strong tangy odour, similar to mint, spilled into the air to drown the smell of death. It was a strange sight of brightness and drab. Most of the men were still wearing Gurfurritt good quality uniforms and boots. Long ago they had ripped off the long sleeves on the shirts, trimmed the long trousers to become shorts, immediately after they had finished up working for the mine. The lads with the smiling Bob Marley T-shirts carried the Fishman’s faithful port. The handle of the old brown fifties suitcase had a long stick threaded through it and they carried it ceremoniously, because it was an honour to carry the Fishman’s port.
The port contained little. A few rolls of wire, a bit of a canvas, a butcher’s knife, a Swiss army pocketknife, spare matches, spare torch batteries, a small radio, a notebook and pen, and a can of Coke he had forgotten to drink. Several men carried black billycans containing any personal belongings worth carting around. They walked through one narrow valley after another, and along a spring-fed river lined with dropping paperbark trees. The going was slow in the valleys where the heavy humidity caused them to perspire badly, and it ran off them like water. The men knew what they had been told. They would carry the boys far into the hills to a cave where their journey would end, and the boys would begin their own journey, and when their destination was reached, they would live in a state of harmonious coalescence with their ancestors.
The journey continued for many hours without rest, until at last, the Fishman stopped. He told the men to wait behind, ‘Settle yourselves a while,’ he said, pointing to a fairytale grove of gidgee trees where the air was so still, you could swear you heard the daydreams of lazy lizards sunning themselves on the branches. This was the first real break in over eighteen hours of moving west, away from the lagoon. The men watched Mozzie go on alone, until he disappeared into the hills where the only things living were dingoes and marsupials. Down onto the ground, he crawled on his belly into a smelly dingo’s lair hidden by grassy tussocks, turpentine scrubs and wild banana vines. From the distance, the men began to hear an echo of bell-like voices wafting down the strange grim faces of the hills.
‘How could dingoes make such a sound?’ Certainly, it was more than one voice.
‘Sounds like cats caterwauling somewhere.’ They listened, some asking, expecting more trouble, what could be happening now?
‘Listen! Strange words? Listen!’
‘Smell that?’
‘It’s all the dingoes around here.’
‘Stop ya cavilling. It’s him. Mozzie’s speaking a different tongue, a dead language, talking to his passed-away relatives. Tribespeople were shot here.’
For a long time they stood waiting. Time passed. They sat down and waited, and more time passed. They dozed off under a weak shade. They woke up hungry from waiting. These were good men consumed with thoughts of how long they must wait until, one by one, everyone started to relax again. They stretched out long fit arms and legs, comforted by the resounding echoes of Mozzie’s voice. Finally, he ended. A long silence emanated from the grim hills, and the men rose to their feet, and craned their necks towards the cave, trying to see if something had happened.
Some of the men threw glances at Will Phantom, seeing what he was going to do, whether he was going to help the Fishman or something. Noise or silence, nothing had bothered Will Phantom. He was still sitting like a sad statue, staring off into space. Small colourful finches bobbed around the ground at his feet, drawing in those who watched them, until, someone who had not been paying attention to the finches, suddenly said, ‘Look at that.’ Two small green-feathered birds, no bigger than mice, jumped from twig to twig in the nearby grass. Rare birds. Rare find. Night parrots. The reward was discussed, but no one was interested. When Will heard their voices, he raised his head towards the kingfisher he heard flying overhead, and with the other raised eyebrows following his, they watched its flight path, heading north towards the coast.
Soon enough Fishman was heard coming back. He came gently swishing and swashing, pushing aside the twiggy scrub with his stick. It was time to go, he announced in a dignified voice. The boys were carried up, and passed through the dingo’s lair into the red-ochre-walled cave. The solemn young men went into the place where only the old people had gone before. Once inside, past the dingo’s entrance, the cave opened out to the one large room of towering red walls. On the floor of the cave lay a heavy coating of dust which when moved by their footsteps, flew into the stale air like red powder, revealing its antiquity. They saw small pieces of animal bones, old broken glass, rusted match tins, ancient stone tools – grinding stones, spearheads, axe heads, all perfectly executed in their manufacture. The ceiling left evidence of fires, of those who had come and cooked and slept beside a fire, back, back and further back in time, one hundred thousand years of dreams, ascending in smoke that rose to the ceiling and stayed there in a dense cover of soot.
And the walls, they screamed at you with the cryptic, painted spirits of the Dreamtime. And inside the walls, was the movement of spirits, moving further and further forward, so the surface appeared to be falling into the frightened eyes of the Fishman’s men. They all stood there inside, crowded like that. Old Fishman was in another world, crying and talking the dead language, walking around, gently pushing past anyone standing in his way. His staff pounded on the living wall, and the men looked away, down at the dusty floor, before seeing the Fishman moving forward through a narrow opening inside the resting spirit’s body. The entrance must have been there already, but it was impossible to have noticed it, because the cave seemed so crowded and occupied with relics from other times. The song cycles’ arias of devotion that had droned on in this place for days and days like locusts before rain, which came from forever in the old, musty air inside, were heard now. The men felt the sound lingering inside their heads.
So, it was with astonishment and awe, these men gaped at what they had been shown, and allowed themselves to be taken into the powerful spirituality, which was somehow the same, but much older than the ornate cathedrals made with stone, or the monasteries and places of worship to relics of bones and other bits and pieces of sanctified saints of old Europe and the Holy Land.
Like some old wizard, Fishman turned back, to indicate with a wave of his stick that the men should follow him. The sombre procession continued onwards into the depths of the creature of the underworld’s belly, into the people’s past. The Fishman kept the march moving, undaunted, and waved his staff left and right, as they proceeded down into the labyrinth of strange corridors in the dimly lit cave, where essential rays of light came tapering down like roots of trees, those of the desert fig tree, or the fat bottle trees, all twisting their roots through cracks in the rocks in search of the cool moisture far, far below. They moved past bones of the deceased laid to rest on rock ledges, or hemmed into crevices. Others leant against the wall in a sitting position, as though they had brought themselves to their final resting place to die.
Using the Eveready torch, kept jammed inside his trouser belt, the Fishman led the way. Behind him, the men followed, carefully watching their steps in the darkness, trying not to slip over the wet rocks in the calcite world of dripping limestone. Inside these chambers, it was a world of cymbals and chimes, children’s music reaching further on, deeper into kilometres of underground watercourses feeding the spring-fed paradise far above in the world of sunshine. Finally, their dark, shadowy figures came to a full stop behind the dull light of the torch.
‘Well! This is it,’ announced Fishman. The men, bunched up behind him, were stunned by what they saw in front of them. On the other side of the small opening, the torch shone across a large underground sea. The open sea was so large rippling waves skimmed across the surface. A breeze filled the darkness. In the ray of torchlight, silvery white seagulls with scotopic eyes that could see in the darkness, were piercing the green water. The birds were feeding on a species of fish the men said they had never seen before.
Shallow shafts glowed intermittently from dim faraway lights which were the stars of this world. The men listened to Mozzie’s gravelly, inharmonious voice continuing his nocturne. Perhaps it pleased the spirits that at least somebody had come along to demonstrate his pietism to the old world.
There did not seem to be any other side to this water world. What’s this place? each had thought. The zealots were simple people, and they found it difficult to adjust to this world which Mozzie had kept from them. Once they had familiarised themselves to the darkness, and explored further, they found a jetty. Glow-worms lit its edge.
All along the stone-carved mooring were well-constructed paperbark canoes resting, it seemed, from antiquity. Each craft was covered in gull droppings and cobwebs. From the bow, a grass rope moored the craft to another cobwebbed rope appearing snakelike up through the water. No one would have been able to guess how long the boats of the dead-language people had been floating there. Many, many centuries, perhaps. The men’s recent grand feelings of having saved their traditional domain had now been completely eaten away to a bundle of raw nerves. What if we invoke the dead being in this place? someone whispered, and it must have been heard by everyone, for they were all startled, as though the question had been screamed at them. No one uttered a word.
‘Where’s Will Phantom? Where is he? Land Rights! Is he here?’ the Fishman suddenly demanded, as if he had no time left in the world, as if they had to get going, high-tailing it out of the place. Will appeared from the darkness, and moved to the Fishman’s side. The old man’s face glowed like a peaceful beacon. Will began helping by pulling in a canoe, positioning it beside the flat rock harbour, holding it steady so the Fishman could place his son inside. Others started to help, just enough, so Fishman could perform the ritual of placing the children himself. It was his responsibility. Will joined the three canoes in a line, one behind the other, with the rope. He was surprised to find the rope was still as supple and strong as the day it was made, possibly thousands of years ago. Did it take aunties, grannies, mothers, sisters, sitting together working the reedy grass in a day of clear blue skies with sunlight on their hands as they talked about living things around them? This was what he said to the Fishman as they stood side by side looking at the canoes, rocking steady like cradles, ready to take the journey across the sea into perpetual night.
The old man said he was thinking it was about time to go, to take the boys across, ‘I got to make sure they learn the language so they can get on.’ Will said that was right, it was time to go, and he gently tossed the rope he was holding, let it fall out in the water, instead of giving it to the hand held out to receive it.
‘You did everything, and they are going in peace now,’ Will said, with a protective arm steadying the old man, and both watched, as the three canoes moved away from the mooring in the swiftly moving current. Silently, the men stepped forward to pay their respects to the canoes drifting silently into the darkness, before turning to walk away. Up ahead, they heard the cavern echoing with the Fishman’s voice bouncing from wall to wall, penetrating their blood, saying his goodbyes to his sons. Wishing them well in their new world. Be good boys. He would put his own affairs in order, then he would be coming back to them, very soon. ‘Luke Fishman, Tristrum Fishman, and you too, Aaron Ho Kum.’ He explained he had adopted this dead boy as his own flesh and blood forever, brother to Luke and Tristrum.
Only Will heard it, while leading the Fishman away, when he looked back over his shoulder. ‘Hear it? Listen!’ He heard a droning sound, and imagined the sound was converging from many different directions. The sound he heard, was as if someone a long way off was playing a stanza on the didgeridoo, then, others responded with their own version of the melody which went droning on as one long prophetic oratorio. Fishman said he had heard it too. ‘Listen!’ He dug his elbow into Will’s ribs. Will looked back and in the blackness, using his eyes like a cat, he saw the seagulls gathering together like a glittering, silvery cloud over the canoes. He saw how the beating of scores of wings could create its own air currents until the waters rippled and splashed into small groups of white capping waves. In the company of the cloud, the canoes moved away, navigating the routes to the spirit world, across the sea.
‘Is it the spirits of the old people? Coming to take them home?’ Fishman asked, knowing Will could see far through the darkness.
‘Yes,’ said Will, while he kept the old man moving along in the direction of the others ahead. Soon, he would have to take the lead and navigate through the maze like a bush animal, retracing its steps.
There was trouble at the entrance. Will cautioned the men to stay back. Through the caverns came the amplified howling of dingoes, resounding from wall to wall, bouncing through them, running down the streams of waters under their feet.
‘Wait here, and I will see what’s happening. Keep an eye on the old man.’
Will moved ahead. He would be a fool to rush forward, tricked into taking the wrong direction into the maze by the reverberating sound. He judged that the entrance to the first cavern had to be much further away than the sound indicated. After fifteen minutes of navigating by memory alone, he not only heard the plaintive howls, but smelt the overpowering stench of the small den laced with urine markings. He edged his way forwards, as near as he dared to go. He did not want his scent to be picked up by the dingoes, since he knew it would frighten them out of the den.
Then he heard the sound of droning engines. He panicked, believing he was surrounded by men who were not dead, who had known exactly where to find him. He felt suddenly trapped in the catastrophic darkness, and compelled to burst through the lair and run, to rush outside like a savage animal. When they had heard the helicopter coming, the dingoes had taken refuge in the lair. Then, as it started to hover close to the entrance, sending clouds of dust inside, they had backed themselves into a frightened pack against the wall, and started to howl. Their sharp ears were unable to tolerate the vibrating noise of the helicopter at close range. As Will watched them, almost lying on top of one another, he knew very soon they would run.
Moments later the helicopter was gone. When the sound was far enough away, he went through to the dingoes’ lair. Straightaway the animals gave him a startled look, stopped whimpering, then shot out the entrance and into the bush. He saw the helicopter heading east, change directions, completing a search grid from north to south, and heading further east to turn, before repeating the pattern.
‘Jee-sus! They are onto us already.’ Mozzie’s men were now assembled on the side of the hill, watching the helicopter making its progress in the distance.
‘How did they know we were here?’
‘I don’t think they knew anything,’ Will said thoughtfully. ‘I think they just landed for a piss in the bush,’ he said, pointing to some turpentine scrub nearby still dripping urine into the wet ground. ‘It was just coincidence that’s all.’
‘They could have been tracking us,’ Fishman added, trashing the bush with the stick.
‘No, I don’t think so. I don’t think they would have been able to get anyone local to help them. In any case, I covered our tracks coming here. There’s nothing any two-bit tracker from miles around would be able to pick up from us.’
‘Are you sure?’ There was a persistence in the Fishman’s voice. He was thinking about his own tracks, and the trail he had made, swishing with his staff. It was a good sign for Will. Fishman was back on board with the living, thank goodness, covering all corners. Finally, he had pushed back his preoccupations of grief. The men openly smiled their relief.
What remained of Mozzie’s convoy stayed in the vicinity of the cave for the rest of the day. They slept soundly. Their dreams proved good. This was how it should be, Mozzie gave his men dreams of youth, good marriages and many children.
Afterwards, when the evening sky was full of storm clouds fiery-blue from the red sun setting low on the horizon, several of the men ventured out into the hills to hunt. The first to return said he had gone through the spinifex ground, and nearly collided with a large female red kangaroo nibbling fresh spinifex shoots. He explained in detail how close he was able to get to the creature, and how he was about to spear it in the heart, when the animal turned and looked at him with eyes like the softest creature on earth, and he felt sorry for it and let it go. Ahhh! Kangaroo meat was good and they were very hungry: but if one must starve for love of an animal, this was understood.
The second hunter returned from the rocky hills and he said he had seen a large red female sitting on a rock ledge, cleaning its paws. Ahhh! No. ‘I looked, and this kangaroo was not cleaning itself at all. It had its paws together because it was praying, and on its left shoulder it had a big scar in the shape of a cross.’ He said he followed it for a long time because he was hungry, but decided he could not kill a holy creature. He explained, he felt good. He felt like living it up. And let it go.
An ashen-faced Will also returned empty-handed from the hills. Strange, but nobody asked since he offered no story. He sat down. He told Mozzie he had seen Hope playing in the hills with flocks of finches. He believed she was leading him away, always staying far ahead, while looking back to see if he was following, but never letting him come close to her. She was in a hurry, heading back in the direction of the dark purple storm clouds up towards the coast.
‘And the finches kept flying towards me, and they kept going south. There, the hills were plentiful with food in the paradise land of the water people. Down in the river, bream, barramundi, grunter, swam through the clear waters, turtles big and small were passing by, floating on top of the water through lotus leaves, and the spear men came home loaded.’
All evening Will went outside to check on the helicopters searching further away to the east, with searchlights, flaring down across the country, from north to south, and back again. He counted at least six helicopters in action and smiled at the cost of modern technology. It was the darnedest thing he thought, ‘Who’s going to find us? We know this country like the back of our hand.’ Fishman came out too. ‘I can hide for weeks and nobody is going to find me. I can disappear like a puff of smoke if I want to.’
This was the unofficial search. Highly confidential. The Gurfurritt boss already knew the disaster at the mine was no accident. He knew it, had a hunch, picked it as foul play in minutes, and acted on it. Within hours of the Fishman and his men disappearing into the hills, the bodies were found in Elias’s boat on the lagoon. Spilling had a sneaking feeling about this, and went straight to the lagoon. Imagine that. Graham Spilling swore blue murder for Chuck and Cookie. ‘Son of a gun if I get my hands on the black bastards,’ he thundered all the way back to the helicopter. His words were as solid as bricks. He called the people who paid him.
‘No police! No one, hear me, go calling the fucking police up here. Don’t talk about this to anyone. Fucking media can piss off. Remember we are mining men and mining men look after their own and mining men keep their bloody mouths shut. We are going to catch these bastards ourselves.’ He said this, word for word, after the orders had come all the way from New York, from the very top of a skyscraper, to Graham standing in a muddy lagoon surrounded by a cloud of flies.
The mobile phone screamed instructions into Graham’s ear and his face whitened. Strange how a skyscraper in New York could cast spells like magic. It could keep a whole floor of workers occupied with knowing whether every single switch was up or down on every last monitoring device on Gurfurritt operations, in the spinifex mind you, on the other side of the world. It could cast a security net over the whole social reality of Desperance, keeping tabs on how much food was in the fridge, who had just replaced a light bulb in town, or monitor the pulse rate of Kevin Phantom lying in a hospital, while he was trying to figure out whether to live or die. It could rock the town this way or that to make stories. It could burn the Council office down, burn the Queen’s picture, to gauge the reaction. Well! As luck would have it, timing was everything this time of year. Fishman and his men were saved by a stroke of nature from early detection by the helicopters. Even the afternoon rainstorms could beat the monitors in New York.
When midnight struck, the convoy prepared to set forth on their long journey west, through the gibber stone desert, following the Dreaming, the Fishman said, as he slowly sniffed the black air outside the cave. In the flashes of lightning from distant northern storms, he looked across at Will Phantom, who was also concentrating on the weather. Both had been thinking about the low-pressure system building up in the Gulf, sensing it in their bones as something different. Seriously different, according to Fishman, twitching his nose in the air to catch the scent of rain coming out of the gidgee trees.
The men were eager to leave, to get moving to avoid the millions of flying ants crawling out of their mounds in the ground. Fishman pointed up to the sky with curled lips, and announced flatly, ‘There’s going to be floods round here.’ Scattered clouds, moving unusually fast, were pouring inland as though they were being pushed from behind by some gigantic monster. Flocks of seagulls had left the coastline and were heading inland. Also screeching, inside these formations, were cockatoos and galahs flying, gliding, south with the coming winds. Fishman looked at all the birds flying overhead, lost in the darkness, bumping against each other, and said matter-of-factly that it would not be long before the helicopters would need to land, ‘Or be brought down by the birds.’
‘Or the wind,’ Will replied.
‘Well then! What are we waiting for men? Let’s get out of here.’ The men were relieved to be finally on their way, even if they were caught in the rains. The faster they moved inland, the further away they would be from the full wrath of the sky spirits, hitting the high country before the floods rushed through the rivers and gibber plains.
‘Well! Old man, this is where I leave you for a while,’ Will said, tapping Fishman on the shoulder. ‘I’m going back up North. You know I got unfinished business to deal with. You got the men here old man, they will look after you. You’ll be alright.’
‘I am not worried about the men looking after me. The Law is the Law and the Law will be looking after all of us. What about you?’
‘I will catch up to you later on, I promise. Or else, I will be here when you come back. Depends on how long it takes. I got to go and find out what happened to Bala. I can’t do any more than that right now.’
‘Okay lad,’ Fishman gave Will one last look. He knew only too well that Will might never return if he went chasing the spirits of his family. He started the departure, ‘West, due south-west.’ The group of men followed, the pre-storm bush emanating a steamed pungency of bloodwood and herb grasses ahead.
The tracks they followed were the very same as an underground river several kilometres wide, travelling from one side of the continent to the other. And Fishman, traveller of the big Dreaming, countryman and water diviner all in one, sensed the presence of water far underground, and knew exactly where he was headed. By dawn, they had become invisible to the eye of search parties near and far, combing the local bush around the region they had left, for nothing.
Angel Day thought she should have stayed at home. Travelling with the convoy was harder than most people could have imagined. Her longing to return home began almost instantly, once they had crossed the rail bridge, on the road out from Desperance. Even then, it was too late. Mozzie refused to take her back. Her face winced with every bump, as she went on questioning herself for leaving. She never lost the look of somebody who had made a mortal mistake. Now, with nothing else to do but sit in the back seat of the white Falcon heading south, she searched until she bellyached for a reason why she could not have been happy enough to stay in Desperance.
Invariably, she would be reproached by the same answers. Even Mozzie said that she wanted to leave because she could not stand the place. ‘Wasn’t that your story?’ He had to take her. Oh! No doubt about it: what a mistake that turned out to be. Norm Phantom had always known something that Mozzie had never learned. Angel Day was not a lady, but a queen. Queens make men awkward. Men unaccustomed to waiting on somebody hand and foot were going to come a cropper with Angel.
Abandoned in the white Falcon, driven by crazy boys who looked like they had never driven a car before, Angel was not impressed that Mozzie had not bothered to come up the road himself to say goodbye to her. The whole situation had become intolerable and she told this to the three lads in the front seat. They did their best to ignore her. Orders were orders, babe. Hoity-toity bitch, they glanced at each other with raised eyebrows. Although she was flattered with the word ‘babe’, she found neither of the overgrown boys, or the unbelievable situation Mozzie had placed her in, the least bit engaging.
She remembered sweet-talking Mozzie, right up to the moment they had left Desperance, trying to convince her it was going to be like the holiday she deserved. Now then – where was he and where was she? Little fish come into the dish. Without a word, he had sent the convoy of cars off. She was told by strangers that they were taking her to see Kevin in hospital. She thought about young Kevin, the promising Kevin, then the big boy Kevin who disobeyed her. Kevin who destroyed his life for nothing. She had not seen Kevin in years and she had no idea why he was in hospital, and if he was, it was no concern of hers. Her eyes fumed as she watched the boys in front escaping into the world of reggae. She questioned Mozzie’s choice of drivers. Why these three? Were they all like this? Laid-back, the three hummed to the song of ‘Buffalo Soldiers’ in another people’s world. Soon they were in cruising mode, slumped into the front seat in almost subliminal comfort, while Bob Marley’s mesmerising voice rose from the dead out of a dust-ingrained cassette player.
Why did he send her with those negligent boys? Talk was talk. He wanted her out of the way. Everyone knows talk. He wanted to get rid of her. Finally, one day, having put the whole puzzle together on the ground, Fishman mused with self-congratulatory quickening of speech, ‘Stand back now and let’s look at the picture.’ See! them little boys, they took the wrong track. Consequences are what consequences are, and, the white Falcon fell into the hole of a devilish place. Only the shamefaced boys returned eventually to personally explain to the Fishman what had happened to the Falcon. Fishman was correct. Just like he said, they had fallen into the most devilish place on earth.
Let’s look at the exact location on the ground where Angel Day’s spirit landed. Some say you can still see it there, waiting for her to come by to reclaim it, in order to return home. The white Falcon was speeding all the way to the big mining town where Angel was to go, according to the story. But that never happened. The boys had young minds, not innocent minds, just simple minds flooded with bitter experience.
In the last moments of the journey in the Falcon, heading up towards the main bitumen road, coming off the dirt within the speed limit, the boys explained, ‘We were going along all fine like.’ Something happened, the dreamy boy driving hit the brakes at the crossroads. But the car did not stop. Instead, the steering wheel spun to the left, and the car crawled along the side of the road that goes through many towns with a pioneer history, until it finally hits the big lights of the eastern seaboard. This was not the road to the right, that led to the mother of all mining towns, and another state border beyond. The boys, excited by the Falcon’s powers of persuasion, quickly spun a new version of the Fishman’s orders for going to ground.
‘Won’t be long now and we will be in town,’ the driver, a curly-headed boy with hooded eyes, told Angel, while trying not to glance at her as he looked over the back seat. He turned and looked back up the road. The other two pushed each other out of the car, stretched their long, skinny limbs, yawned, and moved off into the bush. From their back-to-front peak caps fish heads with strange eyes stared off into the dry wilderness behind, over the car, and back towards the Gulf. Angel stayed in the car, but watched as the boys casually made their way up a hill overlooking the town. One boy was wearing a navy singlet and work shorts, the other, a rainbow-coloured reggae T-shirt and shorts. Both wore thongs but had no difficulty walking up the gravel hill to the lookout.
The place they headed to, was a sortie for young lovers who drove there in the middle of the night, and accidentally conceived their first children. It was the town’s highest point. A summit for broken-hearted people taking a lover’s leap. It was a place where myths sprung from nowhere and claimed the deeds of the next-door neighbour who might have or might not have pushed somebody over the top. Modern literary skills adorned the pinnacle. Curt messages painted over public signs told the story of the town to the whole world passing on the highway. Kill All Coons, or similar, left on the hill for posterity’s sake.
Angel told the boy driver she remembered Mozzie calling the racist slur on the top of the hill the white man’s title deed. ‘He said it was the white people’s way of desecrating Native title written underneath. Mozzie said he had seen the real story when the old people showed it to him.’
It was etched deep in her mind how Mozzie hated that town. He never had one good thing to say about it. He said he would never go to that town again and told everyone else, if they had any sense, they would do the same. Her silence made the boy feel tense. He looked up the hill, wishing his mates would hurry up, wondering what was keeping them. It would only take a minute to drive through if it was all clear, and head on towards the coast. They had already decided to head down to a southbound city: Brisbane, Sydney or Melbourne and get lost for a while. It was like the Fishman said.
For the life of me, what was keeping those two? He did not say anything to Angel but he thought of the last time they went up the hill. They had been driven there after the local constabulary had picked them up in the middle of the night. They were kids really! Aboriginal kids who should never be caught in a flash of a torchlight. Caught! It was like roo hunting for whoever looked for young blacks: Who needed to be taught a lesson. Understand. Before they get too big for themselves. The boys were dumped first. The young girls were dumped miles out of town for a bit of fun. The girls went home and cried rape. It was only a bit of taunting. This was a big town and things like that did not happen in there. We taught them a lesson. Ya can’t call that rape. Get out of here. Their families living black on the edge of town found justice was to send the girls away – it was the only way. They said: We don’t want any more trouble.
The police let the boys go on top of Lookout Hill. The boy tapped the steering wheel, remembering how they looked down and saw the town lights shining. He and his mates had been left to defend themselves against a party of drunken hoons. The families came in troubled cars and took the three boys home, cut them loose, and sat them down on old newspaper. Then, everyone pitched in and bought bottles of methylated spirits and bottles of kerosene, and bottles of vinegar, but nothing was enough to remove the whole drum of tar stolen from the road works, and the feathers from pillows the white boys found in the back of their ‘love vans’. He did not tell Angel Day the story of how their naked bodies burned. His fingers paused on the steering wheel as the lad saw his former self like yesterday, screaming in agony at the burns unit in the local hospital.
The boy did not tell Angel, and she must have thought he had nothing to think about, sitting there, not saying a thing. Nor did he tell her this was the reason why Mozzie took him in the convoy, and the two still on the hill. Bad thoughts should be interrupted, and his were by someone screaming – Move! Move! He and Angel both heard it, and their eyes were instantly drawn up the hill. He gripped the steering wheel, ready to drive, all of his instincts telling him to escape. Up the hill, they saw the other two lads running, slipping and falling in the loose gravel, both faces looking wild.
The whole world was screaming – Move! Move! It was too late. He could see the police car already, speeding up the road, coming straight towards them. It braked, full stop, beside the Falcon. A swift inspection of the unregistered vehicle determined their fate. Well! Well! Well! You boys are coming with me. The three boys were arrested on the spot. Angel watched in silence while the uniformed men dragged them away in the back of the police car.
One policeman came back to the car and casually looked in the window at the back seat. Angel’s heartbeat soared, she was certain it was beating against the roof of the car. She looked nervously at the cold eyes that seemed to be looking up and down at her and along the seat of the car. She clutched her handbag on her lap because she expected to be dragged from the car too, and if it was the last thing she was able to do, she needed to take her handbag with her. The policeman said nothing, and went around to the driver’s side of the car and pulled the keys out of the ignition and left. The police car drove away.
Angel sat wondering what she should do. Would she wait for the boys to return? She considered the prospect of walking into town by herself. Walk into a town she did not know? Impossible, she answered herself. What an absurd thought. How could she walk into town? White people would stare at her. Who would help her? She did not know anybody. What to do? What not to do? She looked at the bitumen road – left or right. But the more you look at bitumen the more it tells you to move. Move! Move! Just like the boys. She wished she had never left home. There was nothing left for her to do but to wait with all her memories until the future collected her.
She sat in the empty car. She brushed her hair, spending so much time on it like a cat preening and thinking minute thoughts. She cleaned her face with the remains of a bottle of mineral water. She applied new lipstick, the colour of congealed blood, and the sight of it in the mirror made her jolt. She saw blood in the mirror flowing from her two boys, spilling on the floor in the jail. She would never know what happened to them. Mozzie had spared her the pain. After some time reflecting on her image, sitting and waiting, not knowing what to do next, she decided to leave the car. Her plan, now that the heat of the day had passed, was to hitchhike down the western road to the big town where the boys were supposed to take her, and wait for Mozzie. If he comes. If he comes. A heroine’s plan either way. She would arrive after an hour in a fast car. Who only knows how long it would take by foot.
One kilometre she walked in her high heels, and not one step more. The phantom who had her soul in a bag, came sidling up to her again, Wanta lift doll? She thought, Doll! Well! Precisely. That’s more like it. She, leg-weary already, never gave it a second thought and she took the lift. Her fate, bizarre and twisted it seemed, had arrived out of hell, in the form of a shiny, black road train, hauled by a Mack truck. Truckies inside, of course. Fishman’s men called out her name at the crossroads, having just arrived themselves, noticing her walking up ahead, but it was already too late. The engines of the big truck drowned out their horrified voices like they had been made by little ants. Their lives went off into another story.
Destiny often visited the foot-walkers’ convoy during the night in dreams. The men were saying they had seen Angel Day living in the worlds of their dreams. They explained to the Fishman that they saw her whole life ahead of her. She lived for several years – decades if the truth must be told, yes. Yes, it was true, Angel now lived unhappily in a devilish place. She would never see the bright starry nights of the Gulf country again. They were painful dreams encompassing some mysterious, windy world, where dull silver strips of tarnished-looking fish glistened in salt under an overcast sky. Rows and rows of these snakelike fish hung on lines drawn over the land, which swayed to and fro with the breeze as far as the eye could behold. Through this grey country many sad children, some who looked like herself, others who looked like people she had never known, came and went. How did this happen? Praise for Angel Day fell easily from the lips now. She was a sensation who dreamt far above the heads of other people.
People cried and shook their heads in sympathy to the Fishman. They paid their respects. You were never supposed to see the look of a deserted woman in those jarring eyes. They sang her praises to each other. She who looked like a lurid wish come true, who had once walked with hips swinging in Desperance. She was like a trophy for best-kept town, most beautiful, best presented, the biggest fruit of a blessed season. Certainly, certainly, it was the most painful memory. Yet a burning candle for her face stayed in the world of local memories.
She disappeared into another world as simply as looking through a hollow log and having no idea where the porcupine went after just having seen him run through it. Poof! It was unbelievable that a living creature could just disappear into thin air. In the end Angel was lost. Lost on the long road to nowhere. Mozzie Fishman, unable to leave his Dreaming road, never went after her. A spiritual man could not just go galivanting around the world when he had his business to attend to.
It was natural that outside the sphere of their world she became hearsay in their lives. Some strange person amongst the zealots who never dreamed, claimed he received a letter in his mind, and took it at once to Mozzie Fishman. He read what was written. Angel Day, he read, now lives indifferently to her surroundings, alongside a fast-flowing tidal river in a cold country which was a mystery to him. The green-grey foul-smelling river, carried along severed heads of domesticated animals, fruit crates from bustling marketplaces, rotting fruit and vegetables thrown into the river as waste, corpses of white people whose lives had not been considered by anyone to be worth two bob, and the broken-hearted wares of many centuries of a poor civilisation. It was plain to see, Angel Day had gone overseas.
The letter read that Angel shares her home, an abandoned grey warehouse with a moss-covered grey-tiled roof, with others like herself who had lost trust in humankind. Sometimes on dull, grey cloudy days, thousands of grey pigeons assembled from nowhere, and choked for space on the roof. Since it rained all the time, there was rainwater leaking into the building through holes in the roof and gushing along rusty pipes and spilling out onto green slimy floors. In the night, it was no good. The warehouse people went to bed as soon as darkness fell. They slept almost on top of each other for warmth, huddling together under damp stacks of old, rotting clothes.
Every day, Angel Day sneaks away, disappearing through the morning mist like a ghost, leaving very early before the others remove themselves from the tangle of clothes they had crawled into like rats. And in this fashion she goes to work. There, before dawn, she joins numerous others, too many to count, standing in lines like sticks of chalk along the wet marshes of the outgoing tide. Even Fishman acknowledged he could sometimes hear them, flicking their strange-looking lines of plastic rope along the waters. Fishman said he felt that close to Angel, he would turn blue with a cold he had never experienced before in his life. Time and again, he said he tried to ask her what she was doing there but she ignored him. Then, when some complete stranger came along and asked her the same question, she replied, ‘Fishing for snakes.’ Otherwise, she would have offered nothing.
Words were the enemy of the twilight world where she lived. No one bothered speaking in her world, except to answer a stranger. Every day, Mozzie watched until Angel’s line resounded with the twang and thrashing about of waters which others, being more experienced snake catchers, were already making. Then, he watches her smile as the slippery snake, like an eel, starts to wind itself around the line and climb up towards her hand. Stealthily, she flicks the snake off the line into a wicker basket and closes the lid. Again and again, she flicks the line back into the emptying marshes, seemingly, unaware she stood in freezing water.
When the grey tide receded and the waters were still, Angel knew the snakes had gone far out to sea and it was safe for her to move. She wades through deep water to go home. She goes past a man with a transportable aquarium. He drives his truck with the aquarium that is so large it fills the back of the truck and is the height of the driver’s cabin. The water is full of grey fish. People pay the tall man to see the fish by throwing money into his upturned grey hat on the ground, but Angel looks for free. Once she reaches the warehouse, she sits in the sun until it fades away, just to put some warmth into her freezing body. Nearby, there are two intertwining trees outside the warehouse and all she thinks about is Fishman or Angel. Eenie, meenie, miney mo, whose dream?
At the first sign of darkness, a hidden old owl hoots from some hole hidden in the branches. Angel runs away to hide while the frightening owl of the plains flies with luminous plumage. No one could even imagine a world with sea snakes flowing in tides, and freezing bodies asleep in damp caverns of clothes where glow-worms lived. But this was how he read the letter.
It felt pretty special to be told any news of a lady like Angel Day although it was hard to imagine her new life. The zealots made up new stories to send to her. She could be like the owl who shone in the night if she slept in a damp place and became covered with phosphorescent larvae. Perhaps her cave in the mountain of clothes was once a palace, glowing with light.
The Fishman exclaimed to anybody in the world that he never knew a woman called Angel Day, whoever she was. ‘Don’t send letters to Mr Fishman.’ Letters were only from whitefellas to other whitefellas. ‘And what am I?’ He was a blackfella. No one had any business addressing any darn letter to him, he said.