A part of his mind looked with icy detachment at the irony of the scene: Devlin glancing behind himself as he worked, terrified of a danger he’d already escaped.
A sick grin took over from the grimace of pain that had screwed the pilot’s face. So, he’d lost another toss. It always was a fifty-fifty chance that the snake would strike him rather than Devlin.
He knew that all along, right from the moment he slipped the latch on the cage as he crawled through to the cockpit to start his pre-flight checks. The cabin door was already locked. The coins were in the air.
It was a punt he couldn’t resist, and he couldn’t even say he’d taken it rashly. This was a move he’d plotted for at least an hour, from when Devlin announced he was making the trip, and from the second he saw the size of the attaché case Devlin wasn’t letting out of his sight.
Usually the smuggled wildlife was all the payment required for the small white parcels they’d load along with the fuel for the return flight. Occasionally, Devlin’s partner would have to hand over a few thousand more, always in cash. But this time, Devlin’s presence on the plane with a bag so big could only mean one thing: this backload required enough cash to make the man nervous.
More than enough money, the pilot figured, for him to keep the promise he’d made to himself all those years ago. After he survived that first night flight across the gulf, he swore it would be the last. And it should have been: ten grand for two nights work was good money in Bahasa Indonesia, English, double Dutch or any other language.
But there were too many bars in Burketown, too many bottles of rum to be drained, too many packs of cards to be shuffled and too many pairs of pennies to spin.
Devlin knew how to pick the right man, and on the few occasions he couldn’t pick his pilot straight up from the gutter and pour him into the Islander, he knew how to swindle him back to submission.
Double or nothing, that was the game.
Double or nothing, and the certainty that no matter how many times the pilot might win, Devlin always had more to play with.
Double or nothing had got him here, and he knew with all the telling clarity of the final whistle that Devlin had won for good.
Or was it more like a draw?
The detached part of his mind saw Devlin’s panic as he struggled with the copilot’s controls while the pilot slid down a bumpy path of shivers and spasms to unconsciousness. He savoured Devlin’s terror, trying to land with too much power and a dead man’s weight on the rudder bars. Then he also saw, in a jarring flash of gambler’s instinct, that the bastard might just be lucky enough to survive.
It was the one last chance the pilot couldn’t afford to take.
What the fuck, he was a dead man anyway.
‘What the fuck?’ he heard Devlin’s muffled yell from the floor of the cabin as the little man was flung sprawling back by the aircraft’s lumbering acceleration.
With the throttles pushed full open and a muttered apology to all the animals, the pilot shoved the nose down in a screaming power dive towards the dark mass a hundred feet below.
Punch Drunk
‘Shearers’re in town.’
‘Yeah?’ Blue grunted between rhythmic blows of the sledge hammer on the tent peg. ‘Where?’
‘Tilly load of ‘em just drove past.’
Blue stopped his pounding. The sledge hammer swung loose from his hand, the hardwood shaft an extension of the lean brown sinew of his arm. He shaded his eyes with his other hand to get a better look at the Holden utility trailing a swirl of dust away from the showgrounds. A forest of heavy shoulders and broad hats filled the back.
‘That’ll make Jimmy happy.’
‘Too right,’ Curl smiled up at Blue, his teeth a startling flash of white against the opal black of his face. ‘Blow half their dough getting pissed, the other half lookin’ for a biff.’
‘That’s our half,’ Blue grinned back.
Curl took the hammer and Blue fell away to give him room to swing. It was a manoeuvre they’d performed many times before. They’d been putting tents up together for close on ten years now. Khaki ones when they started back in 1941, and a lot smaller than this one with its gaudy sideshow paint, thick as a dingo’s dick on the canvas walls around the scaffolding that Jimmy called a stage.
This was where their work would start for the next couple of days: lined up along the stage, gowned and booted, skipping and sparring, ready for the ring.
The smallest of the troupe would pound a drum that had been through more rounds than Les Darcy. Jimmy would bark his challenge to the punters, and the boxers would stare down at the pit of sideshow alley, locking eyes with any bloke likely to take them up on it.
That would be their work from tomorrow. For today, the sledge was good training.
‘Thirsty work,’ Blue stretched up. The western sky was deepening from blazing white to a shimmer the colour of bush fire flames. It looked like this year’s savage drought was never going to end. ‘Feel like an amber?’
‘Fair go,’ Curl’s eyes flashed fierce as the afternoon sun. ‘You want those coppers up me arse again?’
‘Sorry, mate, I forgot.’ Blue had a harder time than Curl accepting the fact that his mate could have died for his country but couldn’t legally walk into a bar.
‘Tell you what, but. I could slaughter one of those lemon squashes they do at the Golden West.’
The milk bar was in full swing as they made the dusty march from the showgrounds to the centre of town. Glenn Miller greeted them from fifty yards away. Trombone harmonies poured out of the juke box as sweet and smooth as syrup, and Curl had to fight hard to kill the jitterbug urge they brought to his feet. One of the first tricks he’d learned under whitefella law was to not draw attention to yourself.
The street felt like Saturday night, with people knocking off early in anticipation of tomorrow’s show holiday. The pub across the street from the Golden West was already well awash with drinkers. The windows of the public bar sprouted so many arms holding middies of beer and glowing fag ends, the squatters’ wives had to swerve to avoid them as they walked from their cars across the verandahed footpath to the Ladies’ Lounge. The milk bar’s booths were filling just as fast with their own crowd – cockies’ kids who couldn’t yet pass for 21, young bucks cultivating John Wayne swaggers, their sheilas practising hard to look like Lauren Bacall.
‘You have just as much right to be here as them,’ Blue said, sensing Curl’s sudden unease. ‘Least on this side of the bloody street.’
The familiar faces of a few sideshow people made it easier to step into the light of the Golden West entrance. That’s where they were when the Holden swung in to park right in front.
The headlights swept across the two men before the driver flicked them off. It was the same utility they’d seen from the showgrounds, still with the same cargo of shearers, and it stopped all the yapping in the Golden West for a moment. This could have been the first of the new Holdens those kids had seen. There were precious few of the sedans this far west, even though they’d been around since 1948, and ’51 was the first year for the ute. The two boxers were more interested in sizing up its occupants, but they, too, were suddenly hushed by what they saw.
‘Jesus bloody Christ!’ breathed Blue. ‘What’s that bastard doing here?’
The man who uncoiled himself out of the passenger’s seat stood erect and stared at them for a long, hard time. His mouth slit open to a smile you could crack concrete on.
‘Well, well, well,’ he called across the footpath. ‘The things you see squirming when you kick up a rock as ugly as this place. If it isn’t me old sparring mates Bluey – and Girly.’
‘Steady, mate.’ Blue put a hand out ready to hold Curl back. ‘Let the bastard crawl back where he belongs.’
The man they’d last known as Staff Sergeant Ted Murray turned away with a derisive salute and strode across the street to where his gang of shearers were pressing their way into the bar.
‘Girly?’ Th
e smirk on the face of a cockie kid was wiped off by one look from Blue.
‘C’mon, mate. My shout for the squashes.’ His arm guided Curl to a stool at the milk bar.
Girly. The name echoed in his skull. He hadn’t heard it since he was demobbed. Girly. It was what Murray called him from that first day up in the islands.
They were replacing two diggers in the one section. They expected it to be tough, fresh faces fitting in with blokes who’d fought the Japs and the jungle long enough to send a man troppo. But what they found was mateship built on humour.
‘F-f-f-fuck what your mothers c-c-called you,’ said Tackie the Owen gunner. ‘Youse look like B-b-b-bluey and C-c-c-curley to me.’
It was a section of nicknames – the other blokes reckoned Tackie had the Owen gun because it fired the way he talked, tak-tak-tak-tak – so they slipped in easily as two names from a comic strip. The tall lean face and the short round one. Not a word about the colour of Curley’s skin.
Curly’s new mates warned him about Murray, but he took little notice. He thought a young lifetime of facing official hostility was preparation enough. He was wrong.
‘Girly.’ It dripped like venom from Murray’s mouth the instant he heard what the section had christened their replacements. ‘That’s what you’ll fight like, if I’m not mistaken. And I’m never wrong on coons.’
Curl thought he could make the bastard eat his words. He put himself up, before he was properly blooded, for forward scout, and he stayed there for longer than was sane. He took risks with his own skin, never with his mates’, and he made so many Jap snipers pay the price of Murray’s slur, even Bluey lost count. But when he came back to forward HQ, it was still – always – as Girly.
He came back to Australia as Girly.
He could have lived with that. He could live with the unit citation that the whole section knew should have been his alone.
There was still something a man could be proud of in all of that. But there was no pride in what Murray did to him after the islands, back at Enoggera.
The lemon squash tasted bitter with the thought of it. The rum Blue furtively tipped from his hip flask into their glasses only added to the fury.
‘I’ll have him,’ Curl snarled. ‘Have him on like I shoulda done back in Brisbane.’
‘You’ll have no one.’ Blue blocked his mate’s way off the stool.
‘Bastard’s got no stripes to hide behind now!’ Curl could feel the words slur in his mouth, as strongly as he could feel the twitch in his fists.
‘The boss copper in this shit hole has.’ Bluey’s hand was vice hard on Curl’s arm. ‘And guess whose side he’d be on?’
So he did what he’d done too many times before. Let Blue steer him back to the showgrounds. Guzzled rum straight from the flask. Buried his pride and his pain in white man’s oblivion.
The next day started slowly. It always did. They had to wait till late afternoon, after the livestock were judged, ribboned and bedded for the night, before the crowd at their end of sideshow alley got big enough to get excited about.
Curl was on the drum. Bluey had sorted that out with Jimmy while he was still sleeping last night off. The rest of the troupe skipped through their paces and Jimmy mouthed the microphone like a kid with fairy floss.
A few of the John Wayne wannabes from the Golden West lined up for the first big session. Their mates dragged the sheilas into the tent to see them last a few rounds in the sawdust ring. Jimmy’s first, second and third rule was to give the crowd a good show for their money by giving their local hero more ring time than he deserved. Sometimes that took more skill than real boxing, and watching Blue work his opponent was more entertaining than the sheep dog trials.
They felt pretty good as they climbed back on the stage to spruik up the next show. It was after dark now. Long shadows from the tent pole lights transformed the alley into a world of mystery and secrets. Some shearers were starting to shoulder their way through the crowd, and the boxers tensed for more serious work.
Curl pounded the drum, life flooding back to him with each beat, as Jimmy taunted the crowd. He put together enough takers for a crowd pleasing session, then went fishing for a finale.
‘One more match, ladies and gentlemen, and I guarantee you’ll see a show better than Madison Square Garden,’ he crooned into the microphone. It came out of the Tannoys more like a whine, but the showmanship was flawless. Four beefy blokes bounced awkwardly on the stage, lined up next to their nominated boxers. When one stripped his shirt off to his blue work singlet, the crowd almost swooned. Jimmy jumped in for the chance.
‘One more laaaadies and gentlemeeeen! Is there one more red blooded sportsman to make this a match up of real heroes?’
‘Here!’ A voice boomed up from the crowd. Ted Murray stepped out of the shadows, jabbing a thick finger at Curl’s chest. ‘And I want the boong on the drum!’ He mimed a drunken drumming stance and made it look like an ape walk.
The drumsticks clattered to the floor at Curl’s feet. He could feel the fury twitching back in his fists.
‘The prick’s pissed,’ Blue shouted into Curl’s ear. They were beside the ring inside the tent, buffetted by the roar of a full house crowd. The bloke with the blue singlet was about to go down for the count against the ropes after five frenzied rounds and the mob was close to fever pitch. Next match would be Curl and Murray. The grand finale.
‘You’re gonna have to work him gentle if you don’t want a riot.’ Blue kept up his barrage of trainer talk in Curl’s ear. ‘At least a coupla rounds.’
Murray glared glassy eyed at them from the opposite corner.
‘He’ll get what he’s good for.’ Curl stared back across the ring, his eyes sharp and dark as a pointing bone.
‘No, mate!’ Blue broke Curl’s gaze with a shake so savage, the little man came close to rounding on him. ‘Don’t you see that’s how he’d win?’
‘Not this time.’
‘Every bloody time! This isn’t the fight with the American. You know you’ll never get that chance again. But you can still be a contender one day, as long as you use your nut. The men you’ve got to impress aren’t here, they’re in Sydney.’
‘What about my own self respect?’
‘Take it from doing your job.’
And suddenly it was time to work. The blue singlet was carted off, fresh sawdust kicked over the blood, and Curl was shaking gloves with the one man in the world he knew he hated absolutely.
The crowd bayed for more blood, sensing the first chance of a local victory in the uneven match in front of them. Murray stood a clear head taller than Curl, his reach looked a foot longer, and his shearer shoulders loomed heavily over the smaller man’s whip handle frame.
As Jimmy held the fighters’ gloves together and mumbled the Marquis of Queensberry at them, Curl could hear fragments of Blue’s hoarse voice against the boom of the crowd.
Head ... not heart ... mark of a pro ... for tomorrow ... not now.
He listened. He called on the skills he knew he possessed to give the gallery the show they’d paid for. He skipped forward, feinted back. Let Murray come close to planting a big right on his chin. Made it look like Murray had him on the run, ignored his constant calls of Girly.
The tent shook with the mob’s excitement. Every wild swing he let Murray get through brought a howl louder than the last. The bell for the first round could have gone by unheard and unheeded, but for Murray taking the chance to slump into his corner. The big man was tiring fast, and Curl admitted to Blue he was enjoying this game of subtle revenge.
He strung him out for a second round, the big man’s punches becoming more random, the calls of Girly more slurred. The mob, now switching allegiance to the little battler, picked up the chant.
‘Girly! Girly! Girly!’ roared around the makeshift arena, erupting to a cheer at the bell.
Curl thought he’d stretch the third close to its time, then finish it with two good knocks. One to the beer sponge of Murray�
�s belly, the second to his chin as his head came down. But Murray surprised everyone by holding his hands up for silence at the start of the round.
‘I’ve won,’ thought Curl as Murray lurched across the ring, his hand out towards him.
‘You think this little boong can fight?’ he bellowed, then waved the wild response down. ‘Or does he just run like a frightened sheila? Girly by name, girlie by nature. Maybe this is more up your alley, Girly.’
And he kissed him.
Chill silence filled the tent. It lasted for three hard heart beats, then was killed by a guttural roar from Curl’s throat. He charged into Murray with a hail of punches that blurred from the big man’s face to his stomach. Each blow bore a thought in Curl’s mind in the same language that sprang from his throat, a language he hadn’t used since he was an infant: one punch for the insult of the name, one for the missing medal, another for the fight against the US Marines lightweight champ that Murray sabotaged before it took place.
He knew Murray was dead before his body hit the ground, but the voice inside him demanded still more.
He punched on, harder and faster: this for the cold hands that dragged him away from his mother’s arms, this for the hot pain of a priest’s passion. And this and this and this for the tears he had never let flow.
He punched on, his gloves red and sticky, until slowly, like coming awake from a nightmare, he could hear the screams of the crowd swelling all around him, and the strength of Blue’s arms dragging him away from the body.
Hit the Silk
Malcolm stretched out in the sun by the pool and contemplated his future as a widower. It would start this afternoon, he thought with a satisfied smile, because today was the day that Fiona would die.
A wealthy widower. Malcolm rolled the thought slowly around his mind, the way he would roll a distinguished shiraz across his palate. He was used to good shiraz, and cabernet sauvignon, and colombard. His taste in wines had matured remarkably in the last seven years, and he admitted he had Fiona to thank for that. Their marriage had given him the money and the leisure to indulge in an intensive education on the finer things.
Murder by Sunshine Page 2