All Our Shimmering Skies

by Dalton, Trent

  Aubrey breathes deep. A wheezing in his lungs. Molly can’t see him clearly. Too dark. But she can smell him. The alcohol still leaching out with his sweat. The odour of tobacco in his clothes and from his mouth. He’s running his hands frantically across the rocks he tumbled onto. Now the smell of naphtha fluid, the flash of the turning flint on Aubrey’s worn metal cigarette lighter. Flash and flash and flame. The small lighter flame inside the cave, and then his face lighting up. His black eyes. The flame shimmering against his black eyes and Molly sees something in those eyes. A kind of dark wonder across them. A fever.

  He feels it before he sees it. The tingle of it runs from the base of his spine to its top. He swings the lighter over the pile of rocks and the rocks bounce light back to him. A gold light. A vivid and wondrous and fevered gold light from the patches of precious gold metal inside these rocks.

  The lighter flame roams across the pile of rocks and Aubrey allows himself a smile. A pile of gold ore. Rough gold nuggets in hard rock casings. Flashes of their wondrous gold light demanding to be exposed to the world.

  Even Molly feels the glowing. Some nuggets are so exposed and pure already that they look to Molly like large clumps of roughly torn honeycomb. Like stuff she could pull from holes in trees.

  This precious gold stuff Aubrey will pull from the heart of stone and carry back to Darwin as a new man. He will be transformed by the deep country and the twinkle of his eyes and the shine of his shoes will say nothing of the blackness inside him.

  Aubrey tries to count them all. Thirty gold nuggets. Forty nuggets. But he loses count. And he allows himself a giggle. And that giggle turns to a laugh and that laugh turns to a howl that echoes through the cave.

  Molly has seen that look upon Uncle Aubrey’s face before. It’s a look of satisfaction. He turns to Molly and howls and the girl brings her knees to her chest and she wraps her arms around her legs, studying the fevered man before her. Howl. Howl. Howl. That deranged howling from deep inside his white spirit stomach. The noise that is made when the tectonic plates in the stone of his heart rub against each other. Howl. Howl. Howl.

  Aubrey stands and rushes, breathless and panting, through the arched opening. His eyes adjust to the light and he sees that the cave opens onto a sandy clearing fringed by black wattle trees and native nutmeg trees and patches of vine forest. He looks back and up to find that he is now standing below the high promontory where he and Molly stood minutes earlier. To his right is another rushing waterway crossed by another makeshift bridge of eucalypt trunks, and to his left he sees a narrow path that disappears between rock walls. Two ways out of the clearing.

  He rushes back into the cave, picks up Molly’s duffel bag and dumps the contents in the dirt. The goldminer’s pan that started all this. Shakespeare’s life’s work. The red rock that Molly pulled from her mother’s chest, the red heart of Violet Hook that turned to stone.

  Aubrey frantically fills the duffel bag with the nuggets that shine brightest in the flamelight. Less rock, more precious metal. Smaller nuggets that might weigh ten pounds, larger ones of maybe twenty pounds and even a few he’s certain are heavier than thirty in his hand. He’s working with such urgency that he pays no mind to Molly when she reaches her hands across the floor in search of the rock she pulled from her mum’s chest. Violet’s rock. But she finds something else instead. Something that cuts her forefinger when she tries to grip it in the darkness. The paring knife.

  She crawls along the dirt floor with the knife and her left hand finds her mother’s rock and she has all she cares about, so she crawls into a space against the cave wall and this space has a view up to the grey sky through the heart of stone. And she asks the sky for just one more gift. A fork of lightning to stab through that hole and burn Aubrey Hook to cinder. A bomb from a death plane. The same kind that tore Horace Hook in two and wedged him inside a tree. A long-lost mother with curled brown hair to come and take her away from the shadow. Take her away from him.

  Aubrey slips a total of ten gold nuggets into the duffel bag and braces his legs as he tests the weight. He strains. He feels a vein in his right temple about to pop, but the gold fever gives him strength. He manages to haul the bag over his shoulder and, satisfied he can bear the weight of all this found gold, he carries it out of the cave and drops it in the centre of the sandstone clearing. He then marches hurriedly back into the cave and picks up one of the largest nuggets, a hunk of gold-heavy ore shaped like a bull’s head that must weigh forty pounds or more. He drops it at Molly Hook’s feet.

  ‘I’ll carry the bag,’ he says. ‘You’ll carry this one.’

  Molly holds her mother’s red rock in both hands.

  ‘No,’ she says.

  ‘Come on, child, let’s go,’ he says. ‘Pick up the rock.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You will carry that rock out of here or you won’t be goin’ out at all,’ Aubrey says.

  Aubrey stands over her now. His black hat and his black shadow face fill the heart-shaped skylight.

  I don’t fear death, she thinks. I have a heart of rock. Molly shakes her head. ‘No,’ she says.

  Aubrey takes the pistol from the back of his trouser belt. Points it at Molly. Casts his eyes briefly around the dark cave.

  ‘Then I guess this hole is the last grave you’ll ever dig yourself into,’ he says.

  His right forefinger slips across the trigger.

  Molly looks past the gun to the sky above the shadow’s head.

  And the frame of grey sky now fills with the frame of Yukio Miki. The sky gift pilot wobbling, groggy and spent, and living and dying. His family’s sacred shortsword in his right hand. His eyes struggling to fix on the shadows moving in the darkness below him.

  Aubrey Hook and his long and bony trigger finger.

  Then Molly holds the red rock up with two hands. She presents it to Aubrey, presents it to the sky. There is little light flowing in through the heart-shaped frame, but all of it catches the colour of the rock. The colour of blood.

  The girl holds the rock as if it is a source of power, as if it is some kind of magic shield forged inside her dead mother’s chest that could somehow protect her from a bullet. Her mother’s stone heart. Her mother’s heart. She holds it there. She holds it there. She holds it there.

  ‘Why couldn’t you love me?’ she whispers.

  And Aubrey Hook is momentarily entranced by the rock’s colour. He’s taken with it. He’s frozen by it, and a long-buried truth is briefly revealed in his voice, an honesty exposed to the light of day, a flash of gold in the broken ore of his life. ‘She wouldn’t let me,’ he says. His eyes on the rock. His finger on the trigger. His eyes on the rock. His finger on the trigger.

  Then Molly drops the red rock and grips the paring knife she holds in her hands behind it and she lunges forward and she screams as she brings her hands down hard, driving the short blade into Aubrey’s right thigh. And Yukio drops blindly through the hole, the near-dead weight of his body landing heavily on Aubrey’s shoulders. His sword spills from his hand on impact but he keeps a grip on Aubrey’s neck, his left arm around the older man’s throat and his right arm already reaching for the pistol that Aubrey instinctively tries to bring to the head of his impossible assailant.

  Aubrey still has Molly’s paring knife stuck in his thigh when he rushes blindly backwards and slams Yukio’s back into the cave wall. There’s a bullet still resting in Yukio’s back and the cave wall meets its point of entry and the pilot screams in agony but he will not release his grip.

  Aubrey is a wild dog now. He roars. Saliva and sweat and blood and bruising across his face. He charges sideways, driving Yukio towards the arched opening. Molly scrambles along the floor, her hands searching blindly in the darkness for the shortsword. Aubrey roars again as he builds to a run and he carries the pilot like a wheat sack and he drives himself and his assailant hard against another wall and the men bounce off this wall and stumble into a roll that spins them out of the cave, where they land hard
on the rough rock of the sandstone clearing, just beside Aubrey’s bag of gold.

  The sound of the full river running alongside them, its whitewater spray. The pilot has fate on his side and he has Nara, and he ends the tumble with his weight on top of Aubrey Hook and he can grip the gravedigger’s pistol hand well enough now to smash it three times against the bag of gold and then he watches the weapon bounce across the ground. Then Aubrey twists hard and fast and the men roll twice again across the sandstone and in the chaos of their movements they do not see that the gun has landed only a yard from two black bare feet poking out of a pair of brown slacks. Aubrey slips a hand free and reaches for the paring knife still stuck in his thigh. He pulls it from his flesh and shoves the blade into the side of Yukio Miki’s stomach.

  What little strength the pilot has left in his arms now abandons him. Aubrey turns him over easily and reaches again for the blade sticking out of Yukio’s belly. He pulls the blade out and he breathes deep and hard and he raises the blade over Yukio’s heart and the only thing that stops him from driving the short knife down into the pilot’s chest are the words of a sixteen-year-old Aboriginal buffalo hunter named Sam Greenway. ‘Hold up there, feller.’

  Aubrey turns to his left to find a pistol pointing at his head. The young man’s face is covered in faded strips of white paint. He’s shirtless and barefoot and in his left hand he carries a long, carved wooden spear almost twice his height. Across his chest are more white lines that rise and bend like fountain water over his shoulders and arms.

  ‘Sam,’ says Molly, standing now at the entrance to the cave, the shortsword in her hands, momentarily dazed by the sight of him. Tyrone Power by way of Mataranka. Her cowboy carrying a spear and a gun. She wanted to say his name louder but it came out so soft. So beaten.

  ‘You all right, Mol’?’ Sam asks.

  Molly has no answer to that. She can only turn silently to Aubrey sitting atop her friend who fell from the sky.

  ‘This feller hurt you, Mol’?’ Sam asks.

  Molly has no answer to that one either. Too dazed. Too spent. She sees movement to her left. Four more Aboriginal men, a similar age to Sam Greenway, emerging from the path between the two rock walls on the left side of the clearing. Same faded paint across their faces and across their chests. Same spears in their hands. The young men say things to Sam in their own language. Sam says things back to them and the young men hiss. One young man taps his spear twice on the ground.

  ‘You want me to plug this feller for you, Mol’?’ Sam asks.

  Molly is silent. She doesn’t take her eyes off Aubrey. ‘Get away from Yukio,’ she says to him.

  The gravedigger drops his head and smiles. He takes his time to adjust his skewed black hat then he stands confidently, shaking his head. He steps back from Yukio and Molly rushes to the bleeding pilot. His head is limply turned to the side. Blood across his belly. A line of blood running from his mouth. Molly kneels down beside him and she places her hand over the leaking knife wound.

  ‘I’m sorry, Yukio,’ she says. ‘I should never have led you here.’

  Sam keeps the pistol trained on Aubrey, who holds his arms out with the paring knife still in his right hand, staring down the young man with the gun.

  ‘You even know how to work one of those, blackfeller?’ Aubrey asks. ‘You ever held a white man’s weapon, eh blackfeller? You ever come across one of those on walkabout?’ Aubrey chuckles to himself. ‘You better not miss, boy.’ And he firms his grip on the knife in his fist.

  Then Sam points the gun at a spot on the ground about three feet to the left of Aubrey and six feet or so behind him.

  ‘And you’d better pick up that hat,’ Sam says.

  Aubrey glances at the spot where Sam is pointing.

  ‘What hat?’ Aubrey asks, puzzled.

  With lightning speed, Sam fires a shot that blows Aubrey’s hat off his head and lands it in the very place Sam was indicating.

  ‘That hat,’ Sam says. Then he looks Aubrey in the eye as he spins the pistol around his finger like a Wild West circus act, stopping the spin twice to aim the weapon threateningly at his target’s forehead before resuming the showy gunplay. Sam’s barefoot friends laugh at the gravedigger’s expense, but their elbow-nudging chuckles are silenced when the old Aboriginal man in the black and faded French admiral’s frock coat emerges from the path between the two rock walls.

  Molly gasps. ‘Longcoat Bob,’ she whispers. The old man’s wild grey hair. So many lines across his face. The crevices in his cheeks are the cracks in all the rocks Molly saw along her journey into the deep country. Longcoat Bob’s country. The scarring across his chest. Each line of it a rapid river running through this treacherous paradise. The long fingers by his sides. The fingers that pointed at her grandfather all those years ago. The fingers that called him out. Stone heart, Bob said. Stone heart.

  Molly turns to Yukio and whispers in his ear. ‘It’s Longcoat Bob, Yukio. He’s a medicine man. I’m gonna ask him to save you. He can save you, Yukio.’ She grips Yukio’s hand. She grips it to her chest. ‘Just hold on. Don’t go anywhere. Just hold on. Please. Please hold on.’

  The old man pats Sam’s shoulder and that’s all that’s required to make the young man with the gun step back respectfully.

  Longcoat Bob runs his deep and watery and grey eyes over the scene. The girl nursing the foreigner on the ground. The duffel bag filled with nuggets. The tall man with the knife in his hand.

  He points at the duffel bag. ‘Them rocks,’ he says. And he speaks softly but so clearly that all the heads in the clearing, including Molly’s, turn towards him. ‘No good.’

  ‘I found those rocks myself,’ Aubrey Hook says. ‘I see no claims on them. They are mine to take as I please.’

  Longcoat Bob studies the tall man’s face. Looks deep into those black eyes. Deep into that tired shadow. ‘Then you must carry all you own,’ he says. And he holds an open palm towards the bridge of eucalypt trunks stretching across the raging river. ‘Go.’

  Aubrey Hook is temporarily stunned by the word. He said go, he tells himself. Walk out of here. Take your gold and leave. Go back to Darwin and build your mansion by the sea. Go back to Darwin and smile down on every last publican who kicked you out of a bar. Smile down on every last woman who rejected your advances. Smile down on every last bank manager and stone supplier and tool salesman who said your money was no good. Smile down on the woman who was meant to love you, but didn’t. Go, he said.

  Aubrey slips the paring knife into the back of his belt. He slowly moves across to his shot hat and takes his time to place it back upon his head. Then he walks over to the duffel bag filled with raw and heavy gold. He squats and braces his back and his veins pulse beneath his sweaty skin as he strains to lift the bag over his shoulder. When the bag is up, he turns on his heels and passes Molly without a single glance in her direction on his way to the bridge, the only exit from the clearing that is open to him.

  At the foot of the bridge he is stopped by the voice of Longcoat Bob.

  ‘You must carry all you own,’ the old man says. ‘But you must own all you carry.’

  Aubrey stares into the old man’s eyes. And he is cold now, even on a day as humid as this one.

  Movement now behind Longcoat Bob. Sam’s friends start talking in their own language to three Aboriginal women who have emerged from the path between the two rock walls. One of them is old, with hair as grey as Longcoat Bob’s, and this woman carries the baby boy who fell from the sky. Then Molly Hook’s eyes find another woman emerging from the pathway. A blonde who was born for moving pictures. Who wears an emerald dress. Has curls like a crashed wave falling across her ear.

  ‘Greta!’ Molly hollers because she can’t help herself. There is relief in that name. There is love in it even more.

  But Greta does not turn to Molly Hook because she is transfixed by the sight of Aubrey. They stare silently at each other for too long. Molly wants him to go. Just go. Stop staring at him, she thinks.
He doesn’t deserve anything from you, Greta. He doesn’t deserve a single look from those silver screen eyes. Look away from him, Greta. Just look away and he’ll go.

  But she does not shift her gaze. She doesn’t even blink. And the shadow man is allowed to speak, though he only says a single word. ‘We . . .’ he says. And then he stops. He says no more. He smiles. And he drops his head and turns to cross the bridge.

  Aubrey steps gingerly onto three slender eucalypt trunks made black and slimy by the spray from the rapids below. Boot after boot after boot. The bridge bends under the weight of the gold on his shoulder and Molly watches him pause. He puts another foot forward and the bridge still bends, but it holds his weight and the gold’s weight, too. Only six or seven more yards to the end of the bridge, he thinks. There are butterflies in his stomach and he can feel the glowing from the gold inside the duffel bag. The glorious glowing. The only thing he has ever needed.

  Boot after boot after boot. Almost at the middle now and almost home to Darwin and almost home to that life with the gold, that life lived inside the glowing. Another step and the bridge bends alarmingly. A crack from the wood beneath him, so loud that everyone can hear it over the roar of the raging rapids. Aubrey takes a single cautious step backwards, but then the wood beneath him cracks again and the bridge drops lower and the gravedigger freezes.

  He brings the duffel bag down to his chest, slowly retrieves a large nugget of gold and drops it into the water to lighten his load. He watches the glow fade in the water and his heart aches to see it disappear like that and the loss fills him with fury and the fury fills him with fearlessness and he takes another step forward across the bridge and the bridge does not crack but it cracks on his next step and it drops closer to the river, so he takes another nugget from the bag and drops it in the water and it sinks quickly to the river floor. But this does not stop the bridge from bending further and it is clearly close to its breaking point now and Aubrey is forced by instinct to turn around and run back towards the safety of the clearing’s rocky ground in the direction of the heart stone cave where the gravedigger girl stands up like a stone pillar and watches his pitiful dilemma from the safety of a hard, rocky earth. But as he does so the tree emits one final, loud, merciless crack. Aubrey Hook stops and stands upright like a figure made of stone. Motionless.