Diamond Dove

by Adrian Hyland

  Around them the subtle panoply of desert life wended its way: centipedes and butcher-birds, barking spiders, sunrays, the prickly little fruits we call teddy-bear's arseholes, dried-out paddy- melons.

  But nothing extraneous did I find, nothing to suggest that a big ugly whitefeller had blundered this way before me.

  I reached the road and gazed at it bleakly. Six inches of drifting bulldust, a mess of ridges and ruts and furrows crissing and crossing and cutting into one another as far in as the wind-rows. What would that maze tell me? Sweet FA.

  Or would it? as I turned to leave, I noticed a break in the wind-row, a few feet from where I stood. A narrow indentation. I crouched low, studied it. A few feet further on was something similar. The sand around them went against the grain of the prevailing ripples. Tyre tracks, perhaps? Smoothed over? I paced them out. Couple of metres apart, a bit more. Wide enough for an Fioo? Possibly. Had somebody parked here? Could well be.

  Were there any other signs of an intruder? I cut a wider arc out from the tyre tracks and found what I'd missed the first time: boot prints, taking a circuitous, northerly route to the hollow. The prints were faded, caved-in, weather-worn, but the further you got from the hollow the more visible they became, as though someone had made a hurried attempt to cover them up.

  I stood up, stretched, tried to imagine the scenario. The darkness, the stealth, that ruddy face gleaming in the Moonlight. I shuddered.

  I heard my name floating on the wind. Hazel's beautiful, high- pitched warble. I was glad to go: the little copse was giving me the creeps. I made my way back through the mulga, pausing only for a glance at the red-earth hollow in which we'd found the body.

  I walked past it, then stopped.

  Red earth?

  Not entirely. A flash of iridescence gleamed through the dirt.

  I swept it aside to uncover a spray of tiny blue pebbles.

  Blue

  Not pebbles, I decided as I rolled them between finger and thumb. More like shards, little splinters of hewn rock, rounded and smooth on one side, rough-split on the other. What were they? Opal? No, they were too angular, almost metallic. One of the sulphides, perhaps? Chalcopyrite? Labradorite? Maybe.

  Where could they have come from?

  I sifted through the surrounding earth, and scouted a wider area, but could find nothing resembling them, no outcrop from which they might have been chipped.

  What did they tell me, these little stones? Not much. They reinforced the possibility of an outsider, perhaps, but would do no more, not unless I could somehow link them to Marsh. The ground on which I'd found them had had fifty hysterical mourners stampeding over it.

  And they weren't just mourners: they were nomads, wanderers. Even these days, they tended to spend a lot of time on the move, both by foot and by car. Anybody from the camp could have picked up a few fragments of non-indigenous rock in their travels and unwittingly brought them here in a trouser cuff or a boot sole. The cops could have brought them. Or the paramedics. I could have brought them here myself.

  With such thoughts rolling around my head and the stones rolling around my pocket, I made my way back to the shack.

  Hazel was sitting by the fire, grinning and flipping a damper on her nimble fingers.

  It was beautiful. We slopped on a layer of golden syrup, ripped it apart and ate it, sipped some tea, passed a pleasant hour in each other's company. I checked my watch: time for me to go. Jimmy and Maggie had loaded my ute with supplies and gifts for the refugees in town: bush potatoes, conkerberries, a trussed-up goanna I hoped nobody was expecting me to put out of its misery.

  Hazel stood in the doorway to say goodbye, a blanket about her shoulders, cheeks glowing.

  'I'll try to get into town,' she said. 'Come and see you.'

  'You do that,' I said. I reached out and feathered the back of her hand. 'I'll put a candle in the window.'

  'A candle? Hang on, I got somethin better'n that.'

  She ducked inside and came out a moment later with a wind- chime, a replica of the one hanging from her veranda.

  'A present,' she smiled, putting it in the back of my ute. 'Hang it on your front porch.'

  She planted a kiss on my cheek. 'Thanks for comin, Em,' she whispered. 'We'll work it out.'

  As our heads parted I opened my eyes. Hazel's own eyes were as lustrous as the mineral in the wind-chime dangling over her shoulder. Eh?

  I took another look, soft-focused. Pulled the stones out of my pocket, compared them with the flashes of blue in the upper section of the wind-chime.

  They were the same.

  'Hazel, the stone in your wind-chime, where'd you get it?'

  'Oh, people…' I felt a sudden tension, a tightening of her fingers in my hand. 'People bring it in. From out bush.'

  'Which people? And from where out bush? It might be important. There wasn't any sign of it last time I was here.'

  She hesitated, let go of me, tugged at an ear-lobe, chewed her lower lip. And then it clicked. God knows, it had taken me long enough.

  Blakie.

  Minerals. Crystals. Rocks. Fossils. Stones of every lustre and colour and composition. They were a magnet for him, they were his trademark, his signature-tune, his call-sign. How often had I seen him and his bloody rocks: he'd talk to them, sing to them, polish them, he'd sit for hours gazing into their depths. He knew their lattices and refractions, their stories and symmetries, their hidden intelligence. Anything out of the ordinary and he'd be onto it. Like me, really. He and I had that much in common.

  It all tallied: the reports of pilfering from mining camps, the crystals on her window ledge, the wind-chime. And yes, even the old mining maps she'd transformed into works of art.

  'He's been here, hasn't he Hazel? Blakie.'

  She shuffled awkwardly.

  'Sweet Jesus. How could you? You've been sheltering him.'

  She turned away, stared at the ground, ran a hand through her hair. Looked uncomfortable.

  Bloody uncomfortable. Much more so than she'd look if shelter was all she had to hide. I felt an icy hand clutch my heart. The owl feather in her swag.

  I grabbed her by the sleeve, glared at her in a rush of rage and jealousy. I'd often suspected that she had a soft spot for Blakie, but it had never occurred to me it could be that soft spot. 'How could you?'

  She pulled away. 'Emily, you don't understand…'

  'Oh, I understand all right. You've been screwing him!'

  'No, you don't understand. He's like a child, that warriya, but…'

  'He's a bloody psychopath, that warriya!' I roared. 'He'd kill you as casually as he'd pick his nose. Probably eat you as casually, too.'

  'I mean that sometimes he does things an he doesn't know what he's doin. Says he can hear spirits…'

  'He hears voices! It's called crazy, Hazel. Schizophrenia, paranoia, I don't bloody know, I'm not a shrink, but what I do know is that he's as twisted as a bloody dishrag!'

  '…but I'm sure he wouldn't have killed my old man.'

  'How could you know that? and even if he didn't kill him it doesn't mean you gotta fuck him!'

  'The old people are talking.' She nodded out at the northern plains. 'There's troublin signs: sickness, bad dreams. Couple of weeks ago, they reckon there was an earthquake up in the hills.'

  'They've been giving us that bullshit all our lives.'

  'That's why everyone was so quick to head back to town. They're afraid.'

  'They just wanted to go back to the pub!'

  'They're sayin there's a mamu out there…'

  'There's a fuckin mamu all right, and he's in your bed!'

  'And why are you so worried about who's in my bed?'

  'I thought we…'

  'We? What do you mean "we"!' Suddenly she'd had enough of my badgering, and somewhere, deep down, I couldn't blame her. She took a step backwards, stomped her foot, fixed me with a furious glare. 'All you ever did was stir up a lot o' trouble and leave me to wear it. Tried to tell you last night - tho
ught we mighta been getting somewhere. But no, nothing's changed, old Emily's gotta keep goin like a bull at a gate. You roll up after all these years and everything goes wrong: my father killed, the community torn apart.'

  I took a moment to unravel the implications of what she was saying. 'Jesus! You're not suggesting I had anything to do with him finishin up, are you?'

  'Don't imagine you strangled him, no. You'd have trouble reaching his neck, for starters. But who knows what you stirred up? You might not even know yourself.' She swept a hand out in the general direction of the desert, fixed her gaze on me. 'There's things out there give you a nightmare to even think about.'

  'But sleeping with Blakie…'

  'So he shares my swag from time to time! So what?' she glared. 'Who I sleep with is none of your business. He's still one of our mob.'

  Right. And I wasn't. The anger shot up in me like the sparks from a farrier's hammer. 'One of your mob?' I spat back at her. 'Last person I heard describe Blakie that way was your old man.' I pulled the stones out of my pocket, shoved them into her face. 'You don't reckon he killed him? Well, next time he pops in for a cuppa and a fuck you might ask him what these were doing on the ground next to your father's throttled body!'

  That stopped her dead. Stopped me dead too, the guilt bobbing up through a whirlwind of anger and jealousy.

  She stared at the stones, shifted her gaze to the mulga, then back to the wind-chime. 'You found these…?'

  'Yes,' I snarled, then wheeled around, stormed back to the ute, jumped into the seat and threw her into gear.

  Christ, I thought, I'd never understand Hazel or her mob. Whenever I thought I was getting anywhere the ground would shift beneath me. Had the city changed me, or had I always been a crazy outsider and just too stupid to notice?

  I hit the road, flat chat, furious. My last glimpse of Hazel was a red blur in the rear-view mirror.

  Only when I missed the turn-off and skidded into a fish-tail did I slow down.

  As the fury subsided it made room for questions.

  Blakie had been sleeping with Hazel. What did that mean? Did it make it more likely that he'd murdered her father, or less likely? Could he have killed him to get him out of the way? Lincoln was a bit more relaxed about Blakie than everybody else, but I doubt whether he'd have wanted him for a son-in-law. Their argument about the diamond dove. Was it about the place, the dreaming - or the person?

  But then my thoughts returned to Marsh, he of the dodgy deals and the pit-bull personality.

  The madman or the cattleman? I didn't know what to think, but if Hazel thought I was responsible, I'd bloody well prove her wrong. And the only way I could do that was to find out who was.

  Shoot!

  As soon as I got back to town I phoned the Aboriginal Lands Council in Alice Springs. I was put through to a field officer named Miller, to whom I made my complaint about Marsh and his trespassing cattle. He promised to look into the matter and get back to me.

  My next port of call was the police station, where I tried, without success, to speak to Tom McGillivray. His day off, they told me, but I knew where he lived so I decided to go and hassle him at home.

  As I was walking back to the car I heard a rough voice behind me.

  'Emily?'

  I turned around. A shapely, big-haired blonde in a tight red dress and silver sandals was standing there staring at me, a young girl bouncing around beside her.

  'It is, isn't it? Emily frickin Tempest?'

  'Candy?' I asked, peering at her.

  'Course it's bloody Candy! Haven't changed that much, have I?'

  'Only for the better, Candy.' I gave her an enthusiastic hug.

  Candy Wilson, in addition to being one of my oldest friends, was that rarest of the rare, a white Territorian who'd actually been born there and emerged with her faculties intact. Her father was head stockman out at Edge River for most of my childhood. After an initial demarcation dispute at the Edge River Races one year, she and I had ended up as good, if sporadic, mates.

  She had turned out a bit of a rough diamond though, if the rough diamond drilled into her left nostril was anything to go by. She had, as well, an array of fat rings on her fingers and a fierce little scorpion tattooed above her right breast. Fair enough, I decided. From what I'd seen of Bluebush, cultivating a rough edge was one way to survive. Cultivating a cactus hedge was another. She was looking pretty good, albeit in a slinky, slightly harried way that whispered 'single mum'.

  'So, Emily,' she was saying, 'what on earth are you doing back here?'

  'What are you doing here, more to the point. I thought you'd be long gone, woman of the world like yourself.'

  'Woman of the world! Huh! I was pregnant a year after you left.'

  'Didn't have me to keep you on the straight and narrow.'

  'You! Fat lot of straight and narrow you would have kept me on! Remember that rough-rider boy I sprung you with at the rodeo?'

  'Should've stuck with him: there's been too many smooth riders since him. And what about you? Is there a Candy Man?' I asked.

  'Don't get me started, bitch!' she laughed. 'The men of Bluebush! Jeez, I oughta write a book about the bastards.'

  The little girl at her side began jiggling around and dragging at her mother's sleeve. 'Mum, you promised me an ice-cream.'

  Her mother frowned. 'Don't push it, Teisha love. Say hello to Emily Tempest. Em's one of my oldest friends. You ever heard me talk about her?'

  'No.'

  'You will. Look Em,' she said to me, 'can't stay; gotta sort this one out. Where are you living?'

  'Toyota Towers.'

  She tore the top off a cigarette pack, scribbled a phone number on it and handed it to me. 'Give us a call.'

  When they'd gone I drove out to McGillivray's place. His property, as I'm sure he would have preferred to hear it described, ten acres of spinifex and wind and a red-brick hacienda at the posh end of town. Posh in the sense that you could take a walk there without getting raped or scabies.

  I found the man himself in the yard out back, a big bay stallion stamping and snorting furiously as he struggled to restrain it with a twitch. He gave the stick another twist and the beast stood still, but its massive shoulders were radiating rage. He stroked its mane, whispered into a quivering ear. Like a lot of other blokes on the fringes of the cattle country, McGillivray was a bit of a cowboy manque.

  'Tom…'

  He glanced at me, nodded curtly, then got back to the business at hand, his own hands busy with a wad of twisted horse nose.

  'Sorry to interrupt.'

  'Yer can make up for it by stickin some of this…' tossing me a bottle of gentian violet, 'onto what's left of the poor bugger's eye.'

  From what I could see there was bugger all left of the poor bugger's eye: the good eye spat fire as I scraped pus out of the gruesome wound that was all I could find of the other and coated it with purple paint.

  'What's happened here?' I asked, momentarily mesmerised by the stream of pus and blood that trickled down the horse's head.

  'Infection. Started out as a grass seed in the eye. Vet took it out a couple of weeks ago.'

  'The seed?'

  'The eye.'

  'Urk…'

  'Thought we'd got rid of the infection, but it keeps coming back. All this fuckin dust and heat…' He waved a despairing arm at the adjoining red-dirt paddock.

  When we were finished we watched the horse go pounding out into the paddock. It swerved to avoid a stump it hadn't seen until the last moment, then careered off into the rest of the mob, scattering them like billiard balls. McGillivray shook his head. 'Gonna have to put a bullet into that poor bugger one of these days, but I can't bring meself. Had him fifteen years. Give it a bit longer - maybe it'll clear up.'

  The horse pushed its way up to a clump of lucerne hay, misjudged it and stumbled, then angrily flicked back its head, looking for somewhere to lay the blame.

  'Maybe,' McGillivray said sadly.

  We adjourned t
o the back porch. McGillivray pulled a beer out of an old fridge by the door and tossed it into my lap.

  'Okay, Emily, shoot!'

  'You're a cynical bastard, Tom. What makes you think I'd need anything other than the pleasure of your company to bring me out here?'

  'Yer old man, for one. I seen that look in his eye when he thinks he's onto a buster.' He licked the foam from his mo with a big, ugly tongue, then added, 'And from the look of you, you reckon it's Lasseter's lost reef. This's about Lincoln, I suppose?'

  I nodded, then gave it to him both barrels. Blakie and Marsh. Everything I had. It wasn't much, but it was too much for his delicate equilibrium.

  'Jesus, Emily!' he interjected when I got to the Earl Marsh bit. He even rolled his eyes - for Tom, after twenty years among undemonstrative Territorians, the equivalent of an hysterical fit. 'You tryin to dip me into it or what? I mean, Blakie we can handle…'

  'You've done a great job so far.'

  'Okay, okay, so you can't get decent help these days, but we'll get im in the end. By waitin if nothin else. But you're askin me to interview Earl Marsh? About a dead blackfeller?' He looked like he'd just spotted a quartet of hooded horsemen cantering up the drive. 'You must've forgotten how things work out here. When Marsh bought Carbine he joined the gods! One call in the wrong direction from that particular quarter and I'm bookin rabbits out on the Gunbarrel Highway.'

  'Somebody's gotta check out the tracks. Somebody's gotta find out what inspired him to sign up Freddy the day before Lincoln died. He have ESP or what? Just think of it as one of the perks of the job, Tom: all that fresh air, travel, you might even score a bit of free meat.'

  'Fuck the free meat - it's dead meat I'm seein, an it's got my brand on it.' I gave him my coldest stare, the one Jack referred to as the Refrigerator. He wiped the sweat off his brow, chewed his inner lip, seemed to tear a sizeable strip from it. 'Oh all right, Emily, all right, course I'll look into it. But, shit, it'd be a lot less complicated if you could prove to me that Blakie did it.'