One of Tom's kids - a six-year-old girl who looked so much like her old man that I thought I saw a big red Dennis Lillee moustache on her lip - came out and delivered a plate of lebkucben, courtesy of his German wife. Like her husband, she'd spotted me for work at first glance and was keeping well out of the way.
I took a biscuit, bit a chunk off, then glanced down at the splinters of blue stone I'd just shown him.
'Blakie probably did do it, Tom. I just want to be sure. Tell you what - I'll make a deal.'
'Reckon I need another beer before I'm ready to do a deal with you, Emily.' He glanced at my stubby. 'How's yours goin'?'
I picked it up and showed him. 'Slowly.'
He went across to the fridge, pulled out another bottle, came back and settled into his chair. 'Okay,' he said warily, 'let's have it. This… deal.'
'You investigate Marsh…'
'And you?'
'Gonna do what my father's been telling me to do for years.'
'What's that?' He flipped the ring and took a swig. *
'Get me a man.'
His eyes grew dark and narrow. 'And which man would that be?'
'Blakie,' I answered, then ducked as a mouthful of beer came spraying in my direction.
The Jindikuyu Waterhole
I nestled down among the rocks - two massive slabs of ironstone on the spur of a sandstone plateau - and prepared myself for another day's hunting. I lay on my stomach, adjusted my binoculars, swept them across the valley below. What my little hideaway lacked in comfort it just about made up for in vantage. From its massed battlements I could spot anything that moved within a wide circumference of the Jindikuyu Waterhole. Without, I hoped, being spotted myself: the last thing I wanted the mad bastard to know was that I was after him.
Jindikuyu, five hundred metres below, was a lonely waterhole at the base of a valley in the hills to the south of Moonlight.
By noon the main disadvantage of my observation post had become apparent. It was exposed to the sun. When I got up that morning I'd dressed lightly - T-shirt, shorts, boots - for what looked like a warm day, but now I regretted it. I pulled the blanket over me, but it still seemed like an oven in there. The gravel that had slipped inside my singlet was turning to mud between my breasts. My elbows looked like shrivelled waterholes, my armpits smelt like onions. The water-bottle I'd brought with me had long been emptied, and I was reluctant to make the long haul back to the car in case he came while I was away.
I peeled the last of my oranges, sucked the juice out of it, ate the flesh, picked at the pith and thought about McGillivray's doubts about the wisdom of my undertaking. I was beginning to share those doubts. This was my fourth waterhole, and all I had to show for my efforts so far was a muddy stomach and mild conjunctivitis.
McGillivray had had more than doubts, of course. When I told him what I was planning to do, he hit the roof and told me I was sailing close to a charge of interfering with the course of justice.
I came anyway. I was sailing close to all sorts of things, the least of which was a criminal conviction. Round here criminal convictions are like sorry scars and body mutilation - a rite of passage. Everybody who's anybody's got one.
Blakie had to be out there somewhere, and I was going to find out where.
One thing I'd always known about him was that, for all his crazy peregrinations, he tended to have a bolthole. Or a series of boltholes, carefully concealed havens among which he circulated and within which he stored the trophies and emblems of his eccentricity: his bottles and bones, his feathers, coins and coloured stones.
Jack and I had stumbled across one of his camps once, while we were out prospecting. It was in a little hollow in the hills above the Mosquito Creek Waterhole. We'd known whose it was at a glance: the translucent skins stretched between branches, the ochre stones and crystals, the reek of green meat. Unfortunately Blakie had come back at the wrong moment and sent us on our way with a volley of spittle and imprecations, but the memory lingered.
The Mosquito had been my first stake-out, of course, but in two days of careful observation I hadn't seen a thing. When I did finally screw up my courage and check out the campsite, I found a family of mulga snakes that looked like they'd been settled there for generations.
If the Mosquito Creek hadn't given me Blakie, however, it had given me an idea of how to find him. Water, that was the key. Blakie might be able to sleep with his rocks, but he couldn't drink them. There were only half a dozen permanent water supplies within striking distance of the Moonlight camp. If I staked them out, one by one, sooner or later I was bound to come across him.
Looked like it was going to be later, I decided by late in the afternoon of the Jindikuyu stake-out. It had been a long hot day. Blakie must have thought so too: clearly he wasn't going to show.
My thoughts turned to Hazel. As they tended to do. I'd fucked things up there all right. As I tended to do.
Blakie and Hazel. I still couldn't believe it. Blakie and a pus-eyed dog would have been a lop-sided enough item - in favour of the dog - but Blakie and my beautiful Hazel? How could she?
I rolled onto my back, closed my eyes, let my mind drift down corridors of filtered light. What would she be doing now? Pottering round the camp, carrying water, cooking. Painting, perhaps. Thinking about me? Christ, who could say? Probably not.
I stirred myself, sat up, took a look around. The only movement to be seen was a shimmer in the air and the odd meandering bullock.
Knock-off time. I'd had enough. McGillivray was right: this was crazy.
Two parrots appeared, scudding through the air like small green boats, rising and falling and forging their way forward: heading for the waterhole. I decided to do the same, get a drink before making the long haul back to the car. I picked up a water- bottle, clambered over the rocks and made my way down to the hole.
I was twenty metres west of the water when a sudden perturbation in the shrubbery made me look up in alarm.
A bullock came clattering out of the umbrella bushes. I sighed with relief: just another thirsty nomad. It stood there staring, tentative-eyed, wing-ribbed, tongue like a dried-out porcupine, then decided I wasn't a threat and moved forward.
Know how you feel, feller, I thought as I watched its great grey body go panting up to the water's edge. Don't worry about me: there's enough for both of us.
I took a step forward, then stopped in horror as a monster exploded out of the waterhole.
It was mud-swathed, water-whirling, huge and hairy, presumably human, with a roar in its throat and an axe in its hands. The bullock's terrified bellow was cut off by a terrible, arcing blow which finished up half way through its skull.
I stood there, rooted in more ways than one.
Where the fuck had Blakie come from? How had he got here without my seeing him? This wasn't the way I'd planned it.
I dropped onto my stomach and hid behind a boulder.
Had he seen me?
Maybe not. I heard him squelching through the mud, heard the carcass being ripped, hacked and cracked, all to the accompaniment of a sonic cocktail of every imaginable bovine fluid.
If I was the next item on the menu he was taking his time getting to me.
Half an hour later I smelt smoke, heard the sound of wood being smashed. I poked my nose round the side of the rock. He was sitting with his back to me, a fire at his feet, a mess of bloody beast beyond. Soon there came the smell of roasting meat. Rib bones. Sizzling offal. Later a set of crocodilian jaws crunching, a pair of fat lips slurping like the suction pump on a slaughterhouse floor.
He began to sing, his big, bull-frog bass hammering out into the night.
Another hour and the singing turned to snoring.
I gave him thirty minutes, then inched my way back up the hill, my heart hitting the mouth-tops every time a rock rolled or a branch broke.
When I finally made the lookout, I was tempted to do a runner, so shaken was I by the closeness of the encounter. But no, I resolved, I'd set ou
t to do a job, and I was determined to see it through. I put a blanket round my shoulders, leaned against a rock. I tried to stay awake, but sleep crept up on me in a subtle flood. The stars were still high in the sky when the cold awoke me. I studied the waterhole: Blakie's fire could be seen dimly glowing at water's edge.
When it grew light enough I was alarmed to see that his blanket was empty. I instinctively glanced behind me, visions of that terrible slaughter-axe racing through my mind, but there was nothing there. Blakie came back into the camp below soon afterwards, a snake draped across his shoulders.
I kept the glasses on him, watched him go about his morning activities. He ate, sang, laid his stones out on the ground and studied them. One time he stopped for a shit under a wirewood tree. So clear was my view that I saw his attendant flies disappear, then return, evidently deciding that Blakie was a better prospect than a free-range turd.
Finally he filled a water-bottle, threw a slab of meat and an armful of bones into an improvised back pack - a blanket twisted around his shoulders - then set off, striding down the valley with the slow, relentless gait of a post-prandial goanna.
I followed. He headed west, keeping to the flats and foothills, for which I was grateful. It made it easier for me to keep to the ridges. From time to time, when I had to cut across a gully or skirt an incline, I'd lose him. But whenever I got back to the heights he reappeared.
I had a moment of concern when he reached the blacksoil plains. It would have been impossible for me to tail him out across those bare, cracking tablelands without being seen, but he swung north, rounded the cape and headed up into Koolya Gorge. For the next twenty minutes I more or less retraced my steps as he worked his way up the gorge.
I lost him in a stand of desert oaks at the bottom of Pangulu Hill, and was surprised when he reappeared a minute later, making his way up its cliffs.
Now I'm fucked, I thought. I'll never be able to follow him up there.
But he'd only climbed for four or five metres when he disappeared.
'What the hell…!' I said out loud.
I studied the spot where I'd last seen him. A clump of hoya vines clung to the rocks there. I focused on the vines, trying to work out what had happened to him.
Soon afterwards his head appeared; he peered up and down the valley, then vanished. There was a cave of some sort in there.
I sat back, allowed myself a brief smile.
I'd found the bugger's hideout.
Taking Blakie
'Emily, Emily, Emily…' He didn't so much enunciate as exhale. Slowly and sadly, like a tyre coming out of a patch of tea-tree scrub.
'Tom, Tom, Tom… What's troubling you?'
'All these complications…'
'Complications! What a worrywart you are. I'm doing your job for you.'
McGillivray gave me a long, sceptical gaze, then returned his attention to the road. I was in the passenger seat of his Toyota, and we were twenty minutes away from the Jindikuyu turn-off.
After my encounter with Blakie, I'd driven straight into Bluebush and told the cops that I knew where he was hiding. Tom hadn't looked too convinced, but he had little choice but to follow up my lead.
'Cleaning up your crime rate,' I went on, waving my arms about. 'How many other regions have got loose murderers roaming around them? Unsolved homicides? Escaped maniacs?'
'We haven't even managed to track down your last suspect yet.'
'Hurl Mars? Not avoiding him, are you?'
'He's a hard man to catch. Sent a constable out to talk to him, but he's been over at the stock sales in Mount Isa. Before that he was in Canberra. On business.'
'Canberra! What sort of business?'
'He's becoming a big cheese in the Cattlemen's Association, your Mr Marsh.'
'Hope they showed him how to use a knife and fork.'
'His missus tells me he's back now, but he's out the stock camp. Doesn't know the meaning of a returned call. If we haven't heard from him by the time I get back from this wild goose chase, I'll go and track him down meself.'
'Maybe the wild goose'll solve the mystery for us.'
'Blakie?' he frowned. 'Maybe.' His maybe sounded as big as his beer gut. 'You sure you'll be able to find this place again?'
'Pretty sure.'
'Normally I would have asked Pepper an Arch, but they don't want to go anywhere near Blakie. Tried to get the ranger to come along - he knows the country as well as any whitefeller, but his office told me he was out bush.'
I had a few doubts of my own, not the least of them about the quality of Tom's support staff. I glanced back at the second police Toyota behind us: the A-Team. There were five of them, and I couldn't help but notice the lingering, malicious attention they'd paid to their equipment - cuffs, clubs, guns, sprays, even a net - when we were loading up. Griffo was there, of course, as were the other two who'd come off the worse for the wear after their last encounter with Blakie. Payback was clearly as much an incentive for them as was any desire to enforce the law.
Tom must have detected my concerns. 'Don't worry about the boys' - he jerked a thumb at the car behind us - 'they've all done their cross-cultural communication course.'
I looked back in time to see the cross-cultural communicator in the driver's seat open his window, limber his lips and let fly with a glob of spit, much of which ended up on his colleagues in the back.
We parked the cars a couple of kilometres away from the cave, and I led the party up into the southern side of the gorge. We reached my vantage point opposite Pangulu Hill just before it became too dark to see what we were doing. There was a bit of sporadic grumbling from the troops when Tom wouldn't allow them a fire, but they did have thermoses of coffee - rummed-up coffee, from the smell of it - hamburgers in foil and thick government swags. They were doing a damn sight better than I had last time I was here, chasing Blakie on a breakfast of orange pith and adrenalin.
McGillivray shook me awake before dawn, and I led him up to the ridge, both of us stumbling about in the dark while his team remained in their swags. 'Won't be needing em just yet,' he explained. We stretched out alongside each other, concealed among a row of scrubby emu bushes that rimmed the ridge, until it grew light enough to see.
'Okay,' I told him. 'It's on the opposite cliff. Fix your glasses on a point about half way between the gneiss and the mica schist.'
'The nice and what?'
'Reddish rock on the left, yellow one on the right. Little patch of greenery there. Hoya vine.'
He studied it, took the glasses away, squinted, rubbed his eyes, then tried again.
'Got it,' he said at last.
'Some sort of cave in there,' I explained.
'Hmmmm…' came the rather dubious response. 'I see.'
'So what do we do now?'
'We wait.'
'How long?'
'Till we're sure he's at home. Already tried taking him in the open once. Don't want to make that mistake again. We're only gonna get one chance. We go sniffin around down there he'll know for sure.'
He nestled down among the shrubbery, and we made a bit of desultory conversation. The talk turned to my early years: the front veranda, the home brew, the old man.
Tom had the scarifying task of informing my father of my mother's death. It was how they first met. Tom was a constable then, officer-in-charge of the Borroloola Police Station. Alice had been travelling with some of our countrywomen in the back of a utility which rolled out on the highway. She'd been thrown and crushed.
It wasn't until months afterwards that Jack realised how considerate Tom had been about the whole ghastly business, how seriously he took the role of a small-town cop: he'd brought us into town from the station where Jack was working, helped arrange the funeral and dropped in, from time to time, during the miserable months that followed.
Jack got the job on Moonlight soon afterwards. When Tom McGillivray turned up a few years later, promoted to sergeant and transferred to Bluebush, the acquaintanceship developed into a frien
dship.
It may have been the fact that he'd had to deliver bad news to my old man once before that made him suddenly wary: 'When we go in, Em, you stay here, right? Like we agreed? I'll leave you with a radio so you can listen in, but no more heroics.'
I glanced at his team of sleeping uglies. 'Don't worry, I wouldn't want to put them under any pressure. Right now, though, I've got other pressures on my mind. Or my bladder.'
'Uh. Right. You go and kill a tree, I'll keep an eye out for Blakie.'
I dropped down from the ridge, made my way back down the faceted slopes until I came to the only tree in sight - a heavily canopied bloodwood that had somehow managed to survive and prosper in this stark environment.
I hitched my dress up and squatted low, then surrendered myself to the eternal pleasures of an early-morning piss in a lovely, lonely landscape.
'Ahem…'
The cough came from directly above.
I sprang to my feet, whipped my undies up and my dress down, took a step backwards, lost my footing, stumbled, recovered and looked up.
For a moment I could discern nothing but the thick foliage of the tree, then I spotted a pair of boots on a branch in its upper
reaches. The boots were attached to a pair of bare, bronzed legs. I tried to place him but the bugger was wearing khaki clothing which seemed to disappear among the greenery. It wasn't until I spotted a red beanie higher up the tree that I realised who it was.
'Jojo Kelly!'
His head popped out of a thicket of leaves. 'Morning, Emily.'
'What the fuck are you doing up there? Aside from perving at my bum?'
'Looking for you, actually.'
'Well you found me.'
'I meant youse - plural. If you're with Tom McGillivray. Got some garbled message saying he wanted a hand.'
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