Nice Shootin' Cowboy

by Anson Cameron

  ‘Our sterile friends are talking it over,’ I say. Alf gets out of the car and goes over and hunts ants up and down a red gum with his piss stream in clear view of us all to show his disgust with the complication. That this even is a complication. I see the Nice Shootin’, Cowboy man and the High Powered woman are still and watching.

  ‘This car’s hot for a baby,’ I tell Cormac.

  ‘And me,’ he says, drinking. The baby is whimpering.

  In the Galaxy they start arguing. The whole car bouncing with her point of view. Alf gets in the back of our car again. He’s left a black map of his anger on the tree. He opens another can.

  ‘I dunno if this is right,’ he says.

  I turn to the back seat. Zara is staring at me with a mistaken smile. The smile of a sister for a brother who’s using a cricket bat to keep the kids on our block quiet and still while she stands raised above them on a forty-four gallon drum singing ‘Everything is Beautiful’ and lobbing petals from roses stolen out of Spivey’s front garden. A brother then using the bat to make them applaud loud enough to get her hooked lifelong. She’s back there somewhere with that brother. Probably thinking I did that for love instead of the joy of pushing people around with a bat.

  She sits there on the back seat of Cormac’s Falcon smiling that mistaken smile. I feel like slapping her. Slapping it. The smile.

  Alf is staring at me too.

  ‘It’s not right,’ I say. ‘There are no honourable transactions done in cars. But if they take it, it’ll be theirs. No colour. Theirs. Ownership’ll beat the shit out of any race problem. Don’t worry about it.’ He starts the Koori song, or noise, again.

  Carp rise in the yellow of the river. We see their lips gape into the heat before they flick down into the super-phosphate puffed slime of the river bed. Something apocalyptic is happening to these fish. The perch and cod are gone and the whiskers on these carp are growing and their eyes have shrunk and their scales are become hard as razors. As kids we’d never seen a European carp. They’ve appeared and done all this in a decade.

  Cormac thinking it’s because of them feeding on what comes out of the abattoir that’s been built upstream to take the udder-shrunk milkers and poddy calves off the dairy farms. But me knowing it’s just he’s haunted by the time he came down from maximum height off a Tarzan swing onto the bloated black and white torso of a just-surfaced Friesian. It exploding in a river-wide spray of decomposed paspalum. Cormac having to swim through it to get back to the bank. And him now having the theory that cattle are rolling along the bottom of the river full time. A silent stampede. Changing what can live in the river to what can feed off moving cows. Never accepting that cow was a lone pollutant, which had wandered through a fence and rolled down the bank and drowned.

  We watch the carp until the Nice Shootin’, Cowboy man jabs a note on the Galaxy horn. I go across and get on their back seat again.

  ‘Well?’

  He stares at me around the vine of smoke and hands a Ninja Turtle lunch box into the back seat. ‘There’s your money.’

  I do an approximate count and take it back to our car. In there the baby is crying in lung-long screams. Zara is singing above it. I throw the lunch box onto the seat beside Cormac. He whoops and hands out the baby and her bag of bottles and bottom equipment. She’s scream-red, nose-run and nappy-soiled. Hardly optimum presentation for handover, as my used-car uncle would say.

  I sit on their back seat with her in my lap. The High Powered woman reaches over at me to take the baby, fat hanging and swaying under her arms. I point to the unopened pack of twenty-four Snugglers for toddlers on the seat next to me. ‘Those nappies are no good for this baby,’ I say. ‘She’s way too small. Those are for kids up and walking.’

  The High Powered woman narrows her eyes and starts hating me right there.

  I ignore her outstretched arms and get out of the Galaxy with the baby. I hand it in the driver’s window to the Nice Shootin’, Cowboy man. Right onto his chest like a stuffed Disney thing. ‘Nice shootin’, cowboy. Now fuck off,’ I say.

  He looks at me like I’m God. Horrified. Face to face with perfect knowledge of his guilt. He finds eye contact hard to hold but he’s brave enough to hold it anyway, through the white vine off his roily. Slowly reaching for the ignition as he passes the screaming baby to the High Powered woman. ‘We’ve tried everything,’ he says.

  He kicks the V8 alive. Loud out of a ruptured muffler it snuffs the close cicadas. He loads fast, fish-tailing revs of his own anger into it. Out of our clearing in a throw of dust and bad feeling that nearly includes a red gum side swipe.

  Zara is standing, feet wide outside Cormac’s car, hyperventilating off nausea in the dust of their wheel-spin. Alf watches her grope for balance. He’s nearly sneering. As if her staggering substance-affected in the dust shows him something. Shows she’s maybe not Our Own Janice. And her not being Our Own Janice meaning he’s probably kidding himself as the Voice Of A Culture Just Heard From. His sneer at them both. With seeing no matter how many one pub towns in ten-inch rainfall country they’ve conned, it’s only their home town over again and doesn’t mean they’ve got out or got significant.

  The sneer deepens on his face as the dust moves out over the river and the cicada-scream rises. Only ended by her likely collapse getting him bouncing barefoot out her open door to help steady her and lean her forward for a clear trajectory of second-thoughts relieving stomach contents.

  I go down to the river and strip off my clothes and wade into the slow water. Cormac brings some beers down. I watch him strip. The brown on his arms and legs and Vee at his throat standing out from the white of his arse and belly and showing him a three-thousand-hour-a-year outdoor forklifting melanoma certainty. So often the suntan tells the story. Tanned limbs equalling a simple man here.

  My own tan being more the all-over gold of a lotion user. A welfare statesman and arranger of things. A thinker who would think for too many years about the money.

  I hang in the water floating my can up in front of my face. Cormac floats on his back balancing his can on his belly, with his feet up away from the river-bed rolling herd. We drink. Me feeling shrimp nibble my feet, sometimes a log or a reef scraping past.

  ‘You keep the money, Corm. For use of the car. Spite of what the rest of us think now we don’t want it.’

  He thinks about this by his usual method of drinking beer.

  ‘Fair enough,’ he says. ‘If it suits. But you tell ’em it was your idea I get it all. I don’t need any linger of feeling on me.’ I tell him there will be no linger of feeling on him.

  When we finish our beers we are drifted round a bend out of sight of the car. We walk back to our clothes in and out of the mud of the falling river. Stepping clear of the wild mint, knowing it’s full of tigers and browns with their muscle made quick by sun.

  In the back of Cormac’s Falcon Alf is staring out the window drinking his beer. Has invented himself a ritual way to drink it. A twist on the lick, sip, suck protocol of the tequila drinkers. What he does is fills his mouth from the can in his left hand, then buries his nose in the little white singlet bunched in his right and inhales slowly and deeply enough to close his eyes with scent reminiscence. Then swallows and opens his eyes again into his stare.

  Zara is cast sideways, her head on his thighs. An unconscious pant against nausea and heat. Her body and mind distressed by the chemicals processing down through her liver and the second thoughts rising up again through the clearing blood of her brain.

  It’s a miserable scene. But miserable scenes are what white people adopt babies out of these days. Only usually they’re countries, not cars.

  So I tell myself I’ve added to the sum of happiness in the world. With even hot-dog-mauled women and mean-minded men deserving kids. Maybe especially them deserving kids.

  A FALL AT THE THIRTIETH

  THE RECESSION follows me. It follows everyone. But today, after what I’ve been through, it’s uniquely hot for me. It follow
s me out of the city, across the “West Gate bridge. I light up a Stuyvesant as I cross the bridge and as I dribble the smoke up over my face the suburbs are in smouldering ruins. It’s a trick I’ve been running since the seventies when the bridge went up.

  When the smoke clears the recession is still on my tail. It traces my scent along the Geelong road, winds down the Great Ocean Road into Lorne, out along the pier, out over the water like a messiah, it circles around the float and then slides down the rope into the depths, into the craypot where my dollar is, or isn’t, made.

  The recession whispers: ‘There’s not enough dough around any more for people to fork out twenty-four bucks a kilo for you crusty mothers. Go nibble plankton and heave up healthy descendants.’ That’s a lot for a recession to say, but it gets it said one way and another. And it’s right, too. Once I get these craypots pulled in I’m going to go knocking over Seven Elevens for a living. Have acne-spattered kids fumbling the day’s takings out of the till into my pockets, while I fan their faces with something sawn-off. And I’ll waddle bow-legged out the door so they can’t check my height on that diabolical measuring stick stuck there. My environment’s changing. I have to evolve, get some hard bark on me, like these woebegone crustaceans I’m lifting into daylight for the last time.

  The diesel engine slows, then roars reverse before subsiding into a neutral throb. The heavy wooden boat is still. I reach out with the gaff and hook in the float until I catch the rope and start pulling. Cold, wet nylon coils are piling around my feet and the familiar ache begins to circle my lower spine. It doesn’t hurt enough to be a good catch. There’s no weight in it. And when I hoik the wicker and wire craypot on board two runty females are its only inhabitants.

  My back hasn’t hurt much for about a year now, and I blame the big end of town. It’s been making killing deals on portable phones while eating out, two meals a day for years, pumping champagne and confidence across restaurant tables and stoking clients up with crayfish and God-knows-what until there’s none of it left … and anyway no money to pay for it now. Extinction is the fate of the dearest dish on the menu in a boom.

  Angie Dayou comes back from the wheel to see the catch. She hunches her shoulders and curls her lips back over perfect teeth and moans, ‘Oh, God. It’s too tragic. There’s nothing down there big enough to boil. We might as well be on a dam bank yabbying if all’s we’re going to get is these pygmies.’

  She doesn’t take the cray shortage that badly really, but she knows I do and she knows what’s friendly. She doesn’t naturally say ‘all’s’ either — she says it so as not to sound better than me. It’s not condescending. I don’t even think she knows she does it. She’s a seventeen-year-old chameleon. If beauty is what it takes to get along with the boys in the pubs and nightclubs along the coast, she has that. In the morning, on the boat, if a low vernacular and a farmer’s pessimism is what’s needed she can do that, too — without thinking.

  She’s graduated from one of the schools that row. One of the good schools. She mentioned one day that her school boatshed had ninety-five ‘shells’ in it … at last count. She didn’t know at that stage I had fallen at the thirtieth of thirty-six payments, like a steeplechaser going down in the straight. She didn’t know the truth about my boat then, or she wouldn’t have mentioned the armada in her own life.

  I start to loop the rope, then unclip the bottom of the craypot and give it a whack and they drop into the live-tank where their hisses drown. Angie walks back to the wheel and pulls her singlet over her head, through her wild hair. She’s done this about mid-morning every day she’s worked for me. But today instead of a bikini top above her cut-off jeans she’s wearing a bra. Translucent.

  To some men in some cultures the difference between a bikini top and a bra would be negligible. To a civilised man like me, who knows better, it’s vast. That arch switch from beach wear to lingerie can destroy the conversation of a civilised man. But I always like her confidence in me, and her show of faith in ignoring this small taboo makes me feel good. I shout ‘unorthodox’ at her, because that’s what she is. She smiles, looking back over her left shoulder-strap, guns the diesel for answer, slips the gear lever and we start for the next float.

  I take my eyes off her brown skin and look across the chrome-backed swell rolling into Lorne. Lome’s going brown too. It hasn’t rained for a long time and the gums go on pumping water out of the ground into their canopies, drying out the European gardens. And because the European trees don’t have the root-spread they have to give up their leaves to the drought, and you can see more of the houses of Lome than is usual at this time of year. Up and down the hills and up and down the coast only the gums are green now and even they are that waxy, granite green that looks beyond vegetation, beyond moisture.

  From where I stand I’ve got to admire the eucalypt. This hard-bitten local that watches the foreigners with their far-fetched foliage fall over day by day while it sucks mightily from the ground all the life that could sustain them. I’d give my left one to be able to dredge life’s juice out of Chase Manhattan and the gnomes of Zurich like that. Each day gets us closer to rain and each day kills more of the things rain could help.

  The diesel roars reverse again and mumbles neutral and I don’t even have to reach for the gaff this time. She’s got the float bumping at the hull beside me, such is her control after two months’ holiday employment. I haul on the rope and when the pot appears it’s empty. I pelvic thrust it, dripping and trailing kelp, high onto the stack of empty pots. For a minute I watch the woven white pattern it’s left in the tan of my stomach fade. Then the engine silences and all vibration through the boat is dissolved into that sensuous marine sway only a spot-on day can bring.

  ‘That’s the last. Unless you put a set off Cathedral Rock,’ she says. She comes to the stern and begins unknotting kelp from that last pot.

  ‘No, that’s the last.’ I pull two crays out of the live-tank and decapitate them with a tomahawk that splatters the deck with shell. Then I lift the engine hatch. Waves of hot diesel fumes break over me as I nestle the crays into a crevice between the engine casing and the exhaust — shell on oily metal — and close the hatch.

  ‘You like a beer, Angie?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. It’s hot.’

  I’ve put this off, but now I go to the live-tank again and, pulling out the remaining three crays, I underarm them overboard. This is like a gong struck to announce life’s radical tack. I see she hears it too. The big noise between hitherto and henceforth.

  I pull two stubbies out of the live-tank and twist their tops off and hand one to her. And I see this act, this throwing the crays overboard, has pushed the day slightly off-centre. Her head is tilted, her jaw muscles flex. She looks fierce, hell-bent to beat emotion. I see we’re going to become formal. We’re going to hide the fact that we won’t see each other again and that we’ve enjoyed each other’s company, become unlikely friends.

  She sits on the deck and leans back against the white wood of the cabin, her toes playing with a fragment of shell. I sit on the edge of the live-tank and we drink our beer. We sit in silence with the sun hard on the water and the boat, until she’s basted with patterns of her own moisture. I open more beers. Soon there’s the sweet smell of submarine meat barbecuing against the slightly obscene backing of burnt shell. I open the engine hatch again and using an oily towel as an oven glove, retrieve the blackened crays and slide one on its back across the deck to her. She slides the old bottle of Thousand Island to me and we go to work on them with anchor bolts, and that makes the lack of conversation normal.

  I appreciate the tangent she took, coming to work on my boat for the summer, instead of going overseas, or to Noosa, or any of the other places her suburb would normally have taken her. She did it for the thrill of the tangent itself, not for me, but I appreciate the way she’s done it. And I reckon of all the memories I’ve salted away and will take away from Loutite Bay and its close waters; the stinks, the storms, the fogs, the coldbl
ooded things I’ve caught and done, the misplaced reefs and close calls and belly laughs of those indelible days that fitted in between payments, some of my strongest images will be of Angie. I’ll have forgotten the bikini top. She’ll be working my boat in this bra and these shorts and this seventeen-summer skin that breaks into a sweat or a smile at the slightest change in temperature or mood and makes me wonder what it would do given other incentive. You’ve got to hark back to days like these. You’ve got to carry these visions through whatever blackout is brewing.

  I want her. No lie. No doubt. But this girl has just left a school that has ninety-five boats in a shed somewhere for when the weather gets fine. That’s just the tip of the tip of the iceberg of the whole damn serene picture of what her life has probably been. And the picture’d get considerably less serene with a thirty-five-year-old crayfisherman grinding her into splintered prewar mountain ash decking while he called out his ex’s name. And anyway, captaincy has its responsibilities. You can’t jump the crew.

  When we’ve finished the crays she sweeps the piles of shell overboard and gets us both another beer. I start pulling the craypots down off the stack. One by one. With the tomahawk I start to hack them into ineffective chunks, not sparing the deck.

  ‘You’re going to sink The Doris?’ she asks matter-of-factly.

  ‘Yeah, well … me and a shitload cargo of interest are.’

  ‘You could get a job. Buy her back.’ She raises her eyebrows in hope but there’s none in her voice.

  ‘There’s nothing to buy her back for, Angie. There’s no crays. She can’t earn her keep any more, so I’m putting her down. I’m too much of a dog-in-the-what-sit to give her up.’

  She starts feeding me new craypots and kicking the broken pieces out of my way so I can swing freely.

  ‘Where’re you going to go, Gus? You can’t sink a boat that’s not really, well … not yours any more, and hang around.’