There were none. I was completely penned in, a sheer cliff at my back, unscalable rocks all around me. Sweet would take a minute or two to reach me, but the outcome was no longer in doubt.
I picked up the only decent rock in sight, settled down to wait.
The next few seconds were astonishingly clear, engulfed in the silent riot of the senses that appears whenever you sit still in the desert. Ants glided over dirt as gracefully as sailboats. Blue-grey shale and silver siltstone pressed against my back.
And suddenly, on a pile of stones a few feet above me, there alighted a bird. A small grey bird with stars on its wings and ringed eyes. A diamond dove. The spirit of this place. Unknowable in itself; but if I know anything about beauty, it reached its purest expression in that delicate assemblage of feather, beak and bone.
She hungry as a hawk, that one. Mebbe dove.
Blakie had said that about me. Blakie, who saw things other people didn't see. Was I diamond dove myself?
The bird gazed at me. I looked back into its eyes, and found myself floating over a translucent pool: I saw speckled fish, yellow sand, springs of rushlit water washed to rainbow ford.
And strangely, unexpectedly, I saw myself and Hazel at Moonlight Downs. We were walking along by the creek in a kind of waking dream. Around us there flowed a weird, ethereal music. It seemed to be coming from the rocks themselves, eddying over dry watercourses and white claypans, riding on drifts of bushfire wind. Country music, perhaps, in the blackfeller sense of both words. The voice of the Jukurrpa.
The Jukurrpa. Perhaps it was the same sense of impending doom that sends old ladies scuttling to mass on a Monday morning that had me pondering metaphysics at this juncture.
I remembered, suddenly, asking Lincoln about it once.
I was thirteen years old and beginning to examine the world through the microscope of my own smart-arsed rationality. And he'd answered me, even if his answer was better pitched to satisfy a Medieval alchemist than a hormonally charged teenager.
I remember he'd cautioned me for breaking some rule or other. God knows which one. I was the community's wild child, forever getting into trouble. Lincoln's dreaming had a stack of rules - if he'd written them down they'd have been thicker than Wisden's Cricketers' Almanack. I think it was the time he caught me cooking fat under starlight. He hadn't punished me, of course, hadn't even criticised me. He never saw that as his role. Just mentioned it as something you shouldn't do. I don't know why I reacted the way I did. I'd been having a bad day. Maybe I had my rags in, maybe I had a few too many books under the belt, maybe I'd just decided it was time to cut loose from the confines of the hillbilly shit-hole in which I imagined I'd been raised.
'What difference does it make?' I remember challenging him. 'What difference does it make? What I cook or where I cook it? What I eat? Where I walk?'
'Is Jukurrpa,' was his casual reply. 'Dreamin. That's it.'
He was sitting on a toprail at the time, doing a bit of repair- work on his girth straps. The heels of his riding boots rested on the midrail. I was standing in front of him, hands on hips, my hat low and my tolerance lower.
'Is dreaming!' I yelled. 'Well that tells me a lot! Is dreaming! And what the hell is dreaming, Lincoln?'
'Dreamin?' He looked puzzled, as if the question - or the possibility that life could be lived with anything other than the integrity he embodied - had never occurred to him.
He thought for a while, looked around, then picked up a newly
polished buckle from his tackle and held it up to the setting sun. 'Is just a 'flection,' he said.
As he moved the buckle a cage of light - a set of interconnecting circles and curves and burnished planes - flew across his shirt and ran up into his eyes. He squinted, grinned, moved it away from his face.
'A reflection?'
'Line o' light. Like a soul. You look at somethin right way - anythin - buckle, bird, stone… look into it, you can see.'
That's it? I remember thinking, livid with youthful stupidity. It's just a reflection? A line of light? That's the divine plan, that's the cosmic truth that underpins our lives? Bullshit!
I hadn't understood him then. But I understood him now. Or saw not so much what he meant as the line of light itself, reflected in the dove's eye. It was like a trajectory, traced in gold.
A trajectory along which - acting on God-knows-what instinct
I threw the rock.
It curved slowly and gracefully along the line of light and bounced harmlessly off the cliff face. Dropped into the sand, a few splinters of granite and a puff of dust the only apparent outcome.
The dove disappeared. A handful of stones, the ones upon which the bird had been resting, tumbled away. Gravel trickled. Things went quiet.
Jesus, Emily, that was a fucking brilliant idea, I thought. What are you going to do now, bite the cunt? A premonition, or memory something I'd seen in a painting, the story of a diamond dove and a white devil - was the only answer I could find.
The rifle barrel came sliding round the corner, followed closely by the devil himself.
'Missed!' he smiled, lowering the weapon at me. Then he tilted his head back and began to laugh, kept laughing until, suspicious for a reason I didn't understand - a premonition of his own, perhaps? - he glanced up to where my rock had struck.
The boulder that had been pressing down on the stones there gave a slight wobble, then toppled forward with a shuddering roar, bringing with it a thunderous little landslide and wiping the smile off his face.
As far as I could tell.
Which, given that he had a ton of granite where seconds before he'd had a head, wasn't all that far. His heels tattooed the earth in a fierce little reflex action, then went still. He hadn't even had time to scream.
I studied his boots for a moment. 'Bullshit I missed.'
The Diamond Driller
I staggered back to where Hazel lay gazing out into the crazy topography of Karlujurru, still whisper-singing.
'He's finished,' I said.
She turned round to look up at me. 'I know.'
'Just like your painting. An avalanche.'
'Not surprised.'
I knelt beside her, tore a strip off her shirt and tried to improve the bandage I'd fashioned.
'So what do we do now, Haze?'
'Dunno,' she shrugged. 'Whatever happens, it'll be okay. You know the trouble with you, Em?'
'Lot of troubles with me, Haze. Take your pick.'
'You worry too much.' She studied me for a moment and smiled.
Nice to be so positive, I thought. Miles from nowhere, buggered and battered and bruised beyond belief, no water and you've got a bullet in you. I closed my eyes as the terrors and tremors of the last few hours welled up inside me, colliding with my consciousness.
My head spun, my body felt like it was giving in to the chorus of torments inflicted upon it of late. The world went black.
'Jesus H. Christ!'
A rough male voice. How long had I been out for? I put a hand to my head, opened my eyes, tried to focus.
The first thing I saw was Camel, standing in front of me. Next to him was Earl Marsh, a gun in his hands, his face as blistered and burnt as ever beneath the sinister shades.
Evidently it was Marsh who'd spoken. He was looking up at where Sweet's body was oozing out from under the rock. Camel followed his gaze and his eyes narrowed viciously.
Shit, I thought. Will this never end? 'Mr Marsh,' I croaked, 'I hope I've completely misjudged you.'
'Why?'
'Because I don't feel up to another fight.'
Another voice, a familiar one, came from behind me. 'Don't think that'll be necessary, Emily.'
I turned my head around to see Jojo kneeling beside Hazel, patching her up, a first aid kit on the ground beside him. She was sitting up and smiling. Down near the burning Hino I noticed a helicopter, its rotors still turning slowly.
'Hello Jojo. Might have known you'd turn up - me flaked out and damn ne
ar naked. How are you, Hazel?'
'In good hands, I reckon.'
'Eh? Don't go gettin too attached to em. Thanks, Jojo.'
'Don't thank me. Thank Earl here.'
'Thank you, Earl.' Marsh nodded uncomfortably. I turned back to Jojo. 'What am I thanking him for?'
'Bringing us out here.'
'And what inspired you to do that, Mr Marsh?'
'You got me thinking, with all your talk about drillin out here. I knew I hadn't, but some bugger had. Thought I knew who. I'd been worrying all along there was something suspicious about the way he died.'
'Mr Marsh, I've got no idea what you're talking about. The way who died?'
'Snowy.'
'Snowy?'
'Snowy Truscott.'
'Who the fuck is…' but the answer came to me even as I asked the question. My old man's late driller mate, the beneficiary of the Green Swamp cricket testimonial.
'They tried to tell me he left the hook off his winch,' Marsh continued. 'Tangled his wheels, rolled the rig. I went an took a look at the wreck. No way Snow'd do that. Done a dozen jobs for me over the years. Knew him as a kid in Winton. Most efficient feller I ever seen. Treated his equipment better than he treated his missus. An he treated her all right, which I oughta know, seein as she's me sister.'
'Snowy Truscott was your brother-in-law?'
'Course he was,' Marsh said gruffly.
'Of course.'
'"Who'd wanner do that to old Snow?" I asked meself. I was talkin to him a few days before he died. Said he had some big job comin up, all very hush-hush, top dollar. But then he let on it were for the South African feller. Wasn't till you accused me of drilling on Moonlight that I twigged. Spotted em out here a coupla times when I was checkin me cattle. Figured they must a found somethin…'
'Oh, they found something all right.' I looked at Jojo, who was coming over to check out the bullet nick in my side. 'And you, Thunderbird 3. You just happened to be out on routine chopper patrol when your telepathic headset picked up my distress signal…'
'I was in the cop shop,' Jojo interjected, 'following up on last night's intruder, when this rather indignant call from Earl came in.'
'Indignant?' Marsh retorted. 'You blame me?'
'Apparently you and him had just had a little discussion out on the Jalyukurru track.'
Marsh frowned. 'Dunno if discussion's the word I'd use… anyway, when I told your friend the ranger about that South African arsehole, he got the idea in his scone that you might both be on the loose out here. He was… persuasive I ought to come back out'n warn you.' He glanced sideways at Jojo. 'Didn't expect the airborne cavalry to turn up as well.'
Jojo blushed. 'I think you know Emily, don't you Mr Marsh? What were the odds there was going to be trouble?'
Marsh looked down at the burning truck, then up at the fallen boulder. 'Trouble all right. Shoulda warned them instead,' he said with a shake of the head.
An abrupt spasm of grief wrenched at my gut. Should have warned those poor old buggers back at the camp, I thought. Turned my face into Jojo's shoulder.
'Anyway, Mung Bean here,' Marsh went on, jerking a thumb at Camel, who I noticed had a few fresh bruises added to the collection Blakie had left him, 'Has been most obligin. Course he owed it to me, after what his fuckin rotties did to me cattle.'
I cleared my throat. 'I was gonna mention that if I ever saw you again. Figured it out, did you?'
He frowned. 'You havin a go at me?'
'Christ Earl, loosen up a bit, will you?'
He scowled at me, then what might have been a smile on other faces rumbled through the granite.
I tried to stand, but things were swimming out of focus.
'Jojo?'
'Yep?'
'How'd you get a chopper?'
'Mate in the charter business. Name's Jason.'
'Jojo?'
'Yep?'
'I think I'm gonna pass out again.'
Which I duly did. But even as I was spiralling southwards, I caught a glimpse of a translucent image: me and Hazel, together on Moonlight Downs, walking along in a kind of waking dream.
Springs of rushlit water washed to rainbow ford.
Somewhere above us a dove was singing.
Acknowledgments
My first and greatest acknowledgment is to the Indigenous people of Central Australia, sitting and singing around camp fires, trudging along sandhills, bouncing around the back of a hundred rusty utes, you shared with me your lives and struck the sparks that have grown into this book.
I would also like to express my gratitude to: my agents, Mary Cunnane and Cressida Hall, for dragging me out of the slush pile and giving me their ongoing support.
Mandy Brett, my editor, for her cleverness, commitment and the occasional kick in the arse.
The rest of the mob at Text, for their faith in my work. Liam Davidson and Sydney smith, for valuable advice on earlier versions of the manuscript.
Many thanks also to Jane Simpson, Gabe Markovics, Jenny Green, David Nash, David Alexander, Robbie Henderson, Paul Ubinger, Suzie Carr, Shane Maloney, Robyn Yucel, John Wolseley, Bill McCann and Chris Quigley.
A special thank you to my beautiful girls, Kristin, Sally and Siena. Even when I was scribbling away in my study, you were never far from my thoughts.
Table of Contents
A Reading from the Book of Blakie
Author's Note. 5
About Skin Names. 6
Glossary. 7
Fat Flies and Green Water: the Sunlit Plains Extended. 8
A Reading from the Book of Blakie. 10
Rough Music. 12
Tom Waits Meets Tiny Tim.. 13
Sorry Business. 14
I Might Try. 16
Blue-Bloody-Bush. 18
Party Girl 20
A Ringer's Breakfast 22
Motor Jack. 24
All in the Game. 27
Go Brother! 28
A Dirty Green Cardigan Caught in the Windbreak. 30
Mars Attacks. 31
In the Gaolhouse Now.. 33
A Devil, a Dove, an Avalanche. 35
Taboo. 37
Investigations. 39
Blue. 40
Shoot! 41
The Jindikuyu Waterhole. 42
Taking Blakie. 43
A Cup of Tea at the Godsfather 46
Carbine Creek. 48
The Secret Ingredient 50
The Captain of the World. 51
The Sandhill Gong Woz Her 53
That Cake - It Flew! 55
At the Hawk's Well 56
Looking Down the Barrel 57
Dropping the Rods. 59
A Bit of a Local Legend. 60
The Director's Cut 62
Sun Tzu Out of Chicken Soup by The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. 64
The Boys are Back in Town. 65
A Canopy of Leaves and Light 67
A Knockabout Geology. 69
Black Hole. 70
Rust 72
Ghost Roads. 75
Boiling Oil 76
The Iceman. 78
Springs of Rushlit Water Washed to Rainbow Ford. 79
The Diamond Driller 81
Acknowledgments. 82
Diamond Dove Page 28