by Paul Collis
‘I’ll keep an eye out for the pigs, Black.’
Blackie grunted and got busy getting Carlos a bit of speed.
‘’Ere, cuz … Git dis into ya,’ Blackie said with a smile.
Carlos gulped it down in one go, and then drank from his bottle of water, smiling, nodding and thanking Blackie with his eyebrows raised.
‘How far to Bathurst, Carlos?’ Blackie asked as they drove away from the bushy place of shadows and wind, into misty rain.
‘Not far, mate. Bout twenty-five,’ Carlos answered.
The air got cold and the rain got heavy. Big splashy blobs of water exploded across the windscreen as they drove down from the escarpment. Bathurst was laid out like a jigsaw below them.
The bush was cut right back from their four-lane highway, to give clear space for service vehicles and the giant power cable rigs that ran away out of sight to signal boxes and other modern things. That ground is cold and stony. Grey is the colour of most days. Grey misty days. Grey ground. Grey rocks. Grey clouds. Grey, grey, greyer in some places grey and sad.
No ceremonial earth dances take place at the top of the mountain now. The old dancers left that place of dreaming when the white people came through with gun, cutlass and the Bible. New dreamers now, in cars and trucks, on trains and in biker lines, dreamers wearing fluoro gear, other men on tractors and crap, sped through the mountain there, slicing the songline to ribbons, killing the dream, and hurting the mother earth.
Forgotten by many, that beautiful place now cries alone all night long for her dancers to come back and step softly, to sing to the old mother earth. She waits there, scarred and bleeding – waiting to be admired again by her children. Waiting to once again be the centre of the world.
A pine forest, planted on one side of the road. All the trees shiver when the wind blows. The pines cry too. They sob like stolen children did when the boss came for them – them pines. They tremble when the chainsaw begins to rip through their brothers’ trunks. They shiver and tremble each time they hear a truck coming, thinking that it might be coming to take them. So, they stand there perfectly uniform, perfectly still. They are scared, hoping that no one will pick them. Brave but too weak to defend themselves against a saw, they tremble beneath the bark. The pines stand alone, together.
Standing so very still in the rain, the pines watched and breathed a sigh of relief as the men drove on by without stopping.
When the men hit the outskirts of Bathurst Blackie stiffened up and sat fully upright to see the city he’d gone to high school at once more.
Blackie said with a fixed stare, ‘Hate dis fucken place!’
His eyes were shiny like opals from the speed he’d taken back before Lithgow. He was off his head a little.
‘Yeah? Why’s that?’ Carlos asked.
Blackie thought of frontier wars he’d read about in history books. He thought about the great Wiradjuri leader Windradyne and thought again of Fanon. He wondered what those two would say to each other.
Lost in thought, Blackie didn’t hear the question, and continued to speak over the top of Carlos.
‘Whitefullas slaughtered blacks here, after Wentworth, Blaxland and Lawson found a way across. Dis is all fucken blood-land ’ere, man!’
They came to the old showground. It was like he remembered it when he went there to race white runners as a kid. The wooden fence still needed a coat of paint. Memories of excited kids and ice creams on the ground, memories of cheering and winning came back to him in a rush making him choke back tears.
‘On your mark! Set! … Bang! Went the gun,’ and, the runners raced away towards a finish line. First – the blue ribbon, second – the red ribbon, third – the green ribbon. Blackie smiled. ‘Used ta race here when I was at school, Carlos,’ he said as they drove past the showground.
‘Yeah,’ Carlos replied.
Blackie dropped the memory talk and looked away out through the window.
Bathurst is green. Green grass everywhere in that town. The fields near the river, where Wiradjuri women once sat and sang to their children, where men, back from fishing, lay back to stretch their backs, where black boys tested their arms with sticks, copying the old men throwing spears, hide stories. Recent ones. Stories of conquest and resistance, bloodstains. Bloodstains everywhere there in that place, if you look hard enough. But the blood has dried and is covered by lawns and food crops. The stories are buried.
Buried from
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‘Git me outa ’ere, man! Me and ’im did a lota hard time in this hole,’ Blackie said, nodding towards Rips, and then pointing down the road, ‘Go dis way.’
They took the old road out. Not the new one that runs up past the gaol. The old road. Out past All Hallows School, on the old road near the river, out past the row of poplar trees, where the magpies delight in dive-bombing the school kids in the spring. The men drove out past the scary old house on the overgrown estate, past the side road that runs up the back way to the cemetery and on to the gaol. Out past the Eglinton turn-off they went, fast, and on up around the bend they flew towards Orange.
Blackie’s thoughts returned to McWilliams. McWilliams with the square face and lazy eye. McWilliams the red-face, always trying to hide his rage from the world. McWilliams the jealous man.
‘Yeah man. Ole “Red Label” was jealous of everything! ’Specially me,’ Blackie said.
It made McWilliams as mad as hell. He swore that he wasn’t gonna take it anymore! He thought that no one knew of his jealous heart. It was a heavy weight. And it hurt him like carrying a sack of stones. But it fuelled his rage and determination more than anything else. He made promises to himself that he’d get Blackie one day, no matter how long it took him. He’d get ’em all back for laughing at him, making him feel small.
And now a Crown Sergeant, he thought he was King Shit! They’d all take notice now, he told himself. He had dreams of climbing the ladder. He did things he wasn’t supposed to do to get ahead. He took credit for the labour of others. He cheated and he lied. He worked slyly and he worked hard.
All that loneliness as a kid made him more determined and fragile than most. A man who hid himself behind his badge and his uniform. He coached kids in football in his spare time, and spoke to old people about community watch programs. The general population saw him as a great guy and yet the same guy kicked the shit out of drunks when no one was looking. Beneath his blue police uniform and awards, a crook lurked and waited for his turn to make it big.
When the opportunity came to nab Blackie, McWilliams seized his opportunity with both hands. He accused him of supplying narcotics. Blackie fell in the shit. He didn’t stand a chance in court. He went down hard. Dropped without a prayer. As the Queen looked down from her glass frame upon her black subject, Blackie got nine years with a non-parole period of six. ‘Got ya now, you black cunt,’ McWilliams mouthed, when the sentence came down from the bench.
‘Get fucked, you white cunt!’ Blackie mouthed back from the dock.
McWilliams smiled an ugly victory smile as they led Blackie away and spent the afternoon drinking single malt whisky with his mates at the RSL.
Blackie spent the rest of his day sulking and pacing the watch-house floor, refusing bread and water.
The truck took him next day to Silverwater, and his long sentence began in stormy weather.
Blackie served every day of the sentence with McWilliams on his mind.
Blackie didn’t contest the charge, like some other people might have. He suffered silently, grew wild. He didn’t forget McWilliams for a minute. And he didn’t forgive, like he’d seen other blackfullas do once they got into their sentence. All those guys wanted were to be out again and do it all over again. Party animals, those guys. But the party was over for Blackie. He just waited and waited for the day he’d see McWilliams
again. He got fit. And then he got fitter! He walked the clean floor of B Wing like he was king. Men stepped aside, and screws watched him carefully, raided his room and searched his hole.
Time passed slowly.
Years followed years.
But finally, Blackie was out.
‘I’m still just a Blackie Blackie,’ he murmured, ‘but you’re the real fucken pig, ya copper bastard! I’ll see you soon, you fuck! Count on it, cunt!’
‘Wonder if big-arse there is gonna wake up ’fore we hit Dubbo?’ Blackie asked aloud.
Blackie hummed a verse from the great Roy Buchanan blues number to himself, ‘Roy’s Blues’. ‘Roy’s Blues’ could have been written for him.
After a while, Carlos took up the conversation again.
‘You grow up with Rips, Black?’
‘Na … met him in gaol, man.’
‘What was he in for?’
‘Killed someone … by mistake …’ Blackie answered softly.
Blackie leant back and smoked as he spoke about meeting Rips in gaol for the first time and how a quick friendship grew between the two of them. Blackie remembered that it was a hot day in summer when he arrived at Silverwater. The first person he saw when his feet hit the ground from the transport truck was a stocky blackfulla with a smile a mile wide it seemed, leaning against the fence. ‘Cuz, where you from?’ a blackfulla called to Blackie.
‘Dubbo, bra. What bout you?’ Blackie answered as he went through the gate.
‘Wild Gate, brother,’ Rips replied, meaning he was from Walgett.
And because the two were from the western district, that was all it took for the two to form alliance. Rips showed Blackie around and kicked the other guy who was sharing his cell out on his ear, telling him to find another bed, and, just like that, Blackie moved in. The two black men shared a friendship based upon similar cultural backgrounds and stood beside each other if trouble or fights came their way.
Carlos was stoking the old Commodore up as they roared on towards Lucknow, doing over a hundred kilometres an hour. The land reminded Blackie so much of his past. It held secrets, too, he felt there were ghosts all around. Everything came back in flashes of green and grey as the bush flew by.
He used to visit Lucknow as a kid, on school excursions. It was an exciting place to get lost for a while.
Lucknow is just a little place now, just outside the city of Orange. It clings to the side of the highway, like moss to a rock. Lucknow, that small place that grew out of the Wentworth estate, rich with the yellow metal! It was once a thriving town, cashed up and full of action. Men rushed there to search for the flash of yellow in their pans. It was noisy with the work of shovels, with people grunting and swearing in despair, and in joy when they got lucky. While the rush was on, it was the place to be for the white people.
Just a few seconds drive-through on the road to a bigger place now though.
Before the white people, Lucknow was a quiet place where Wiradjuri people rested. And before that: it was a place where Rainbow Snake rested on the great river-making journey. It became the place where old Wiradjuri men told stories of the Dreaming to their children at evening time. Large mobs of grey kangaroos hopped over rock ground, huge flocks of black cockatoos blocked out the sun.
Wiradjuri people remember Lucknow as their homeland, a place taken from them in a violent land grab. And they know it was Rainbow Snake’s resting place. The white people desecrated and disgraced that place, and the Wiradjuri people saw white people value it in the economic but not in the spiritual way. So the Snake Dreaming place got dirty with waste and rubbish to stand there now completely overgrown, overlooked, and mostly forgotten.
The ghosts of old Wiradjuri linger there though, and, if you’re quiet – very quiet – those ghosts will visit you sometimes. They’ll come around, those ghosts will, if you go poking around beside the old streams. You might feel their ghostly presence in the icy wind that blows up under your hair, behind your collar, in the afternoons when camp fires are lit. The ghosts look at the visitors from the trees. They wait there. They wait for the return of the Wiradjuri people, those ghosts, to hear black kids playing in the water.
Blackie looked but didn’t see any ghosts by the road, though he thought that ghosts still hung around. He smelt their sweet smell as they drove past.
‘Git away from here, bud,’ Blackie crossed his arms and held himself tight together, ‘too many fucken ghosts!’
Carlos eased the car back into the single lane.
‘Hope we have good luck, Carlos. Highway Patrol all long ’ere, man. Watch it bud,’ Blackie warned.
Carlos slowed down and looked too; he couldn’t see any cops or ghosts hiding behind signs or trees. So he gunned it up around the bend. The car engine screamed loudly as up around the sweeping bend they raced. They drove along quietly for a while, lost in thought. Then they slipped by Orange in the light rain, taking the side road out of town towards Wellington, unseen.
‘Yeah man,’ Blackie continued, ‘met Rips in gaol. He accidentally killed his girlfriend when he was young. Hit her by mistake one night, when he was fightin another bloke. She jumped in between ’em to stop ’em, and he dropped her by mistake. Died from hitting her head on the gutter.’
‘Fuck!’ gulped Carlos.
‘Yeah … fuck, alright,’ Blackie agreed.
Rips loved her. Yeah, everything was sweet between those two lovers. It was serious love between them two, you know?
And yet, Rips killed the girl – smashing his young love in the gutter. All that’s left of it now is her memory, the bloodstain on the cement. Her ghost was Rips’ secret companion. She was always there, hanging round in his head, invading his dreams and waking him up. Nothing could hold her spirit down. She’d slip straight through the bars of every cell he slept in. Through the walls of the buildings, she’d come. She’d sit there at the foot of his bed and look at him. He’d asked her for forgiveness a million times.
She’d just sit there.
He cried when no one was looking.
‘Ya know, cops barred him from his hometown, Carlos?’ Blackie said.
‘Yeah? What for?’
‘Cause they can. Said they wuz worried about fights tween the families,’ Blackie answered, and opened another beer.
Carlos knew the story about Rips and the killing of his girlfriend, he heard it from others when they were bongin-on around the fire at Mascot, but he wanted to know more.
Carlos, the busy-body, was always on the lookout for stories about people so that he might incorporate them into his own pretend life when talking to impress people he met. But Blackie said no more on the matter.
Blackie remembered Rips telling him how payback after payback took its turn between the families over the years.
‘Everyone got it, bra,’ Rips told him. ‘Dey always fightin back ’ome over me, bud.’
But no one suffered more than the girl’s mother.
Once in a blue moon, Rips’d sneak back to the little dusty town of his birth, under the cover of darkness, to see his own old mother, and some of his closest relatives.
Carlos lit a smoke, and the smoke went down the wrong way, making him choke on it, making Blackie laugh. Blackie suddenly thought of the US president Clinton, and smiled.
‘Fucken liar, hey Carlos?’ Blackie asked.
‘Who, bra?’ Carlos asked, watery-eyed and sniffling.
‘Clinton! The fucker … Remember … “Yes I smoked mar-it-chew-warrn-na. But I did not inhale!” Remember him saying that?’
‘Na. Not really bud. Dunno anyone named Clinton,’ Carlos said.
‘You idiot!’ Blackie scoffed. ‘He was American president.’
‘Ahh, him … yeah. I remember him …’ Carlos bullshitted.
Clinton might not have inhaled, but Rips did – big time! Blackie told the story about the bounc
ers who were trying to stand over a little old chap who had done all his dough on the horses and the pokies. The Cauliflower Hotel on Botany Road was always full of music and people on Saturday nights. It was the place to be to pick up women, men and drugs. Bouncers stood at the door and stood over those they could in order to impress mostly newcomers to the pub – those who’d heard what a swingin joint it was. The bouncers were making a joke outa the old fella. They were show-offs, full of muscles and steroids. Full of themselves. Full of shit, man. The old man happened to be in that dingy bar that time and that was the wrong bar at the wrong time. The bouncers thought that they’d get a cheap victory.
That was until the Big Rips made it his business to be the old chap’s champion. Rips hated bouncers. He couldn’t stand stand-overs. He hated all them in their uniforms, with their arms full of tatts.
And so, trying to sound like Mr T in that Rocky movie, Rips challenged the bouncers to ‘come over ’ere an abba crack at a real man, not a old pensioner!’
The bouncers didn’t like that much. And so it was on. But Rips dropped them. Both of them. The bouncers were out cold and bleeding. Big, bad Rips then pulled out his big, black dick and pissed all over their heads, right there on the street in front of everyone. By the time Blackie got to the brawl it was all over, and Rips was standing there, bare-chested, smiling broadly, and pissing freely, showing all and sundry his cock.
‘Fuck! Sooo funny, man …’ Blackie laughed, remembering the gasps of disgust from the women who’d seen the whole affair.
‘He escaped from custody once, Rips did,’ Blackie continued. ‘Held cops at bay for a long time. Hmm. True, man! They bought the Rapid Response Group in to deal with that one, brother.’
A cop finally talked sense into Rips, and he gave himself up in the early morning light. Coppers kicked his guts in behind the cars, outa sight. Another two-year sentence went onto his original term. They sent him to hell.
Off to Lithgow he went.
Off to solitary.
By the time he got out, he was fucked.
Chapter 4