We check about a dozen springers, until dawn is angling long golden beams through the trees and we can no longer be poachers and no longer be the only men on Earth. The magic diminishes as the light grows. It is Australia again. It is Saturday. It is 1969.
Lucky Simson treated authority as if it was a ghost. A once-living and legitimate force that had been killed in the war and was now a pale adumbration, lingering and calling, but not real. It had lost meaning for him. He couldn’t believe in it if he’d wanted to. He had seen beneath the shroud of rank, grace and dignity inside which humanity clothed itself and found a vicious idiot. God and Man were both frauds. And this revelation was constantly ratified with laughter … at God and at Man.
In the Second War Lucky had fought in the Western Desert as part of a machine-gun crew. A knuckleboner, he called himself. Because he ground good men into knucklebones. When I was seven he told me he had once seen a troop of Italian cavalry crest a dune at sunrise with the light behind them, the ostrich plumes in their felt hats silhouette like a field of wheat vibrating against the new sun. Grandest sight he’d ever seen. And what did you do then, Lucky? I asked. Killed ’em all, Lucky. Turned ’em into knucklebones.
He was captured at the Fall of Singapore by the Japanese and used as a slave on the Burma Railway, where he had a pet monkey the guards liked to burn with cigarettes. This, for him, was one cruelty too many. It seemed unnecessary, when they owned thousands of men who needed brutalising daily, that they stub cigarettes on his monkey. Why burn the monkey, Lucky? He would ask me this when I was a boy as if I had an answer and was holding out. ‘I don’t know, Lucky.’
‘Well, think about it, Lucky. “I don’t know” is a lazy answer. Why burn the monkey?’
I knew why they burnt the monkey. They burnt the monkey to burn him. But I couldn’t articulate this.
He didn’t like the Japanese. They had taught him discipline, death, malice, meaninglessness and survival. But after the coercions of Bushido, a water bailiff counting clicks on a Dethridge wheel, or a Fisheries and Wildlife inspector asking to search your boat, or the police wanting you to blow into a bag or aghast at the chronic unroadworthiness of your ute, or a magistrate throwing a gavel because you were singing ‘Goodnight Irene’ in his court – these were children brandishing junk rules and the law was a board game.
He could shoot a shotgun beautifully and could hit airborne targets with a rifle. Dad would throw a bottle into the air high above the river and Lucky, leaning into a .22 in a rare moment of furrowed seriousness, would explode it at its wonky zenith, glass raining across the water like a Zero crash as I called out in cartoon Japanese, ‘Aww, Aussies shoot me down. Aussies shoot me down. No good for me. Aussies shoot me down.’ And the men laughed at my joke.
Dad could never work out where Lucky got his dough. He was an orchardist, but not with huge orchards. He had an unexplained source of income, it was said. If you ever asked him how he financed some new purchase, a car, a holiday, a swimming pool, he’d say, ‘Uncle Sos, Lucky.’ But no one believed this. We speculated he had some benefactor from the war. Some mate he’d helped survive the Burma Railway. Some son of Toorak he’d nursed through that Japanese dystopia.
I revered these friends of Dad because they had a DIY ethical dexterity that Dad didn’t have and couldn’t afford. They were rascals. He had gone to a private school, was now a lawyer, respecting the law and working at the mysterious and somewhat unmanly combat that took place in our local court that kept our fragile community from breaking out into the more honest hostilities a boy longed to see. Our economic future as a family depended on his having a good name. His place in the world made him step back from the madcap adventures of his war veteran friends. It was risky enough that he hung around with these eccentric characters, without joining them to shoot ducks off the sewage ponds on a Sunday. His competitors, the district’s other lawyers, didn’t have friends like these.
WW2 made my childhood a godless era. We didn’t go to church. Few people did, after the war. It was a hard time to be a priest. The soldiers had been to the red centre of existence and none of them had come back extolling the Light of Jesus or confirming the Compassion of the Lord. Priests were no longer experts in the thing they were trying to sell. For a generation after any war priests ply their trade on the widows and scuttle light-stepped with shame away from the returned men.
The cops of the Goulburn Valley were too young to have gone to war. The magistrates and judges were lawyers during the war, essential citizens, so they didn’t go away either. And these men, Lucky and Barrel and others, having tasted cordite and bonemeal, were expected to come back here and toe a line prescribed and enforced by wigged home-bodies and badged youths and scuttling widow-charmers. No. No. The life of these returned men was lived against the odds, was borrowed from their dead mates who took the bullet or the sword blow that might have been theirs. It was a precious gift from friends who would never be met again. And they would live it how they wanted. These returned men would frame their own morality. And that morality was deaf to priests, coppers, Fisheries and Wildlife inspectors and magistrates because they yapped provincial truths in a frequency the veterans could choose not to hear.
They seemed as free as children to me, a child. They laughed without weighing laughter’s propriety. They drove Willys Jeeps and army DUKWs, they let off explosions to sort out small glitches in reticulation. They walked barefoot through the bush, over patches of devil’s-heads, and picked hot pans from campfires with their bare hands and drank beer from long-necked bottles. And they spoke without filter. The town knew they were owed a debt, these men who had returned from death. So the town cut them a lot of slack.
The summer I was seven Lucky bought a brand new cherry-red Mercedes-Benz. The Goulburn Valley was a plain of Holdens and Fords with a few old Humbers wheezing along. A beast as futuristic and red as this stood out like a unicorn at the sheep yards. There was wild speculation in Shepparton and Mooroopna. Did Lucky pay tax? Did he grow illicit crops for long-hairs under his pear trees? Was he supplying the embryonic counter-culture with Mary Jane? Running weed up the Hume to the big smoke?
The seats were cream leather and the Mercedes smelt so strongly of new car that I could sit in it and inhale and become a Jetson, see visions of myself zipping around a future city on a flying scooter.
Lucky was a rabid fisherman and shooter. A hunter always knee-deep in mud wearing Y-fronts. Like Huck Finn, who reasoned a stole watermelon tasted better than a bought one, Lucky found rare piquancy in illegally shot game and illegally caught fish. He was a tireless and inventive poacher. A week after Lucky bought the Mercedes, he and Barrel dragged Victoria Lake.
The lake is still there, right in town, a massive puddle left over when the flooded Goulburn River retreated. Dragnets were, and are, illegal. So they arrived in the last of the night with magpies carolling and, in their underpants, waded out and hauled the net through the lake. They felt it jerk and become heavy and they whispered across the water to each other that they were onto something. We’re onto something here, Lucky.
The catch was massive. Yellowbelly, undercover of the local by-law that prevented fishing in the centre of town, had bred up to massive numbers. As Lucky and Barrel dragged them out onto the levee they realised they had a logistical problem: how to steal away with half a ton of illegal fish before dawn and discovery.
They began to put them in the boot of the Benz loose, alive. A well-fed yellowbelly is about the size of a badly-fed corgi. They filled the boot with them and then they began to throw them into the car itself until it was filled with flipping, gaping yellowbelly right up to the windowsills. They couldn’t open the doors or the fish would pour out. So they climbed in the front windows and squirmed down through the depths of fish onto the seats. Lucky felt around with his bare feet until he located the accelerator and brake. Sitting in his new Mercedes up to his tits in live fish he reached out, swimming his hand through their slimy mass, and found the key and turned
it. The car started. ‘The Krauts, Lucky. The Krauts don’t let you down.’ They drove off dressed only in their underpants immersed in half a ton of live illegally netted fish.
And, by my reckoning, anyone who saw them, any early riser, the paperboy, the baker, the milkman, the garbos, the insomniacs and peeping Toms, would have thought to themselves, ‘There goes Lucky, nude, in fish, in his Mercedes.’ It would have been no especially peculiar thing, Barrel and his friend nude in illegal fish, and the early risers would have forgotten the sight by mid-morning.
The inside of the Merc was veneered with fish slime and scale and fish piss and mud that after a few summer days became an iridescent, almost pretty, shellac. Lucky’s wife, Margie, was, and needed to be, the most forbearing woman in a shire of women who cut their post-war beaux plenty of slack. She must have known regular tides of despair as his schemes and affronts broke over the shire. But she was never angry, always kind, always able to accept in a minute some craziness she couldn’t have imagined a minute ago. Her new car now stank like a prawn trawler.
A week later we were leaving Lucky’s house to pick sweet-corn from a surprised Italian who leased some land from Lucky and was confounded to see Lucky striding out into the middle of his crop, again and again, and helping himself and his friends to all the corn they could pick. The terms of Lucky’s leases were loose. Mediterranean types who leased his lands had become sharecroppers without knowing it. He constantly gave us baskets of tomatoes or sacks of broad beans he picked from the crops of his tenants.
Dad and Lucky got in the front of the Mercedes and I got in the back. The stink of fish on German leather turned out to pack the same nasal affront as an inflated roadside wombat. I gagged and tumbled out onto the ground sucking air. The smell inside the car was one Jonah would have known. ‘Lucky, your car stinks.’ I spat into the dirt. Lucky, red-faced, pot-bellied, looked at me on my hands and knees, a weird boy always reading books and asking strange questions, not quite in tune with his laudable rural escapades. Then he looked at Dad to let him know he thought the man had a problem on his hands.
‘Fish don’t stink, Lucky,’ he told us. Dad sat alongside him, smiling. Enjoying my consternation. The Japanese had placed this man so far beyond normal cares he couldn’t smell rotten fish and didn’t think it wrong to use a brand new car as a dumpster. He lived in a happy place where material possessions had lost all value and wrecking a new Merc with fish made perfect sense.
If Charles Darwin, that chronic collector of whelks, beetles, finches, pigeons and dormice, had owned a Frigidaire it wouldn’t have contained a fraction of the dead critters Lucky’s did. In there were cigar tubes filled with dormant bardi grubs, jars of frogs, jars of spiders, jars of sparrows, wading birds cocooned in Glad Wrap, jars of sludge that turned out to be blends of finch and mouse, or huntsmen and yabbie, all atomised using Margie’s Magimix into delectable pastes that could be frozen and strapped to hooks to catch the elusive Murray cod. Lucky’s quest for the cod kept him awake at night.
The Simsons lived out of town among green orchards in humid air and lapping channels from which the water fanned out among the trees, each gallon counted by the shire using steel wheels called Dethridge wheels. Outside their big wooden house was the district’s first private swimming pool. All water in the Goulburn Valley was brown. Even the Raymond West Pool, the town’s public pool, had a sandy bottom and held brown water. Lucky’s pool was filled with aqua water that people drove miles to see. It was like seeing a green sky or a turnip the size and shape of Harold Holt.
But that colour, that stupendous aqua, being Lucky’s, and not adequately tended, soon faded and died. The second time we went out there to swim it wasn’t quite so brilliant. I blinked at it to try and light it up. Maybe I’d become blasé. But within two years it was as brown as all other water in the valley, a live bait tank that had carp and frogs and yabbies living in it and water spiders skating across its surface in formation like Christmas Canadians. Shags dive-bombed this cube of corralled canapés and Lucky would sometimes shoot them out the open door while sitting on his sofa watching Ironside on TV without ever losing track of the intricate courtroom drama or killing any member of his family. He was, I suppose, a multi-tasker.
All the riverine life forms living in Lucky’s swimming pool were competing for scraps and concoctions launched at timed intervals across the water in pellet form from a small pneumatic cannon that had originally been used to serve tennis balls at a local pro but, since that athlete had done his knee and was off the circuit, was now firing Lucky’s blended and desiccated gruels at confused aquatic critters who would usually sniff at them and maybe nibble them, before turning up their noses, if they had them. And if you think the gulf between species is so wide that homo sapiens in the form of a nine-year-old boy couldn’t see flat out unadulterated disappointment flare in a yabbie’s eyes, then you never saw how his airborne snacks were received by Lucky’s incarcerated host of river life.
I was out at Lucky’s place one Sunday afternoon doing jobs to pay for his rain gauge, which I had shot a hole in with an air rifle down so low it couldn’t give a reading of any but the lightest shower. I sat down poolside and began to admire the food launcher, its parabolic grace, the way the fish flinched as Lucky’s dried sludge bombarded them at ten-minute intervals. But I was soon bored with watching them rained on with foodstuffs that had no real ballistic bite. Donning my artilleryman’s cap I emptied Lucky’s foul fish-feed from the feeder magazine of his food launcher and replaced it with gravel and clods and pointed the barrel of the thing directly down at the water.
It blasted viciously into the pool and the water spiders raced this way and that like a school excursion being dive-bombed by Stukas and the fish panicked for the depths. Ten minutes later, by the time of the next bombardment, they had assumed a truce and risen innocently into the peaceable shallows – to be viciously strafed once more. They were serial suckers for a first strike.
But nothing was being killed. So I was upgrading my ammunition from clods to half bricks I found on a pile behind a shed, and telling myself that these half bricks were more-or-less atomic, the invention of Fat Man and Little Boy, and that these carp were entering a harsh nuclear reality, when I saw a black Rolls-Royce coming slowly up the Simsons’ long drive. I dropped my half bricks and gave up my war. Here was something more fascinating than forcing carp to surrender in Japanese accents with their fins held high.
Margie had invited female acquaintances around to play bridge. The guest list suggests the occasion was an attempt at social advancement, a shot at rising up the community rankings. For Lady Frampton, matriarch of the retail family, had wended her way glacially from town in her Rolls-Royce ferrying unimpeachable matriarchs. Myrna Stuart of the meatworks Stuarts and Calm Furphy of the water-cart clan. Big, dynastic women who smelt like geraniums in a heatwave.
Lady Frampton was a fascinating piece of powdered aristocracy. I was always expecting her to die or insult someone. And she never died while I was watching. She was known for her rheumatism and this day she flashed her knobby finger joints beneath my nose as proof she had been singled out for excruciation nonpareil and said, ‘Some of us are tested. Pray you aren’t tested. Though,’ she looked me up and down, ‘I doubt you will be.’ No. Why would the Lord bother testing me when he was guaranteed a fiasco?
Forgetting my chores, which, to be honest, I had already forgotten in preference to bombarding fish with bricks, I followed the ladies inside and hid behind a sofa and ceased to exist so I wouldn’t cramp their far-ranging and bitter talk.
Given that Lady F was tested by the vicious strain of rheumatism the Lord usually reserved for royalty, Margie, though it was autumn and the day warm, had insisted Lucky light a fire. Preened and pearled the ladies took their places at the card table and sipped a sweet sherry before the pulsing hearth. The cards were played in wily fashion by the liver-spotted hands, and a tea cake was served and the lesser women of the district were having their shortcom
ings brought forth and magnified and cast in bronze by whiskered lips dotted with yellow crumbs when a rumbling was heard.
In later life I recognised it as the sound of a train coming at you through a tunnel when you’re on a subway platform, pushing a tide of air before it. The bridge quartet went still as the chimney huffed a lungful of smoke into the room prior to disgorging what looked like the smoking, blackened head of a Roman centurion still wearing his helmet.
The thing splashed red coals across the rug and onto the ladies’ shoes and rolled out among them with its mouth gaping a silent scream and oozing smoke rings and a drizzle of white smoke escaping from each blackened eyehole. The pandemonium of the aged ladies was a thing that would have done credit to much younger, slimmer, drunker women. In their adrenal high they shouted words plucked from the North Shepp playground that goose-bumped my flesh to hear from the lips of the district’s dowagers. And they pulled at each other’s hair and hauled on each other’s pearls to be out the door and into Lady Frampton’s Roller first. Lady Frampton, in her haste to get gone, left a mink stole behind, which Lucky later cut into swatches he wrapped around bardi grubs for cod lures. I remember him dejectedly ticking mink off his list of possible sure-fire cod baits a week or so later, saying, ‘Mink’s no better than fox, Lucky. Or cocker spaniel.’
The trio of social lionesses crammed into Lady Frampton’s Roller and the two that weren’t driving told her, Go, Lady F. Go. Gun this enormous status symbol for the Greater City of Shepparton where the citizens won’t bowl the smouldering heads of dead centurions at us as if we were morticians, archeologists or ninepins. Lady F cut a tunnel through Margie’s much-loved bamboo grove by way of short cut or by way of revenge as she turned the Roller for home.
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