The Golden Soak

by Innes, Hammond;

  There was another long silence, his eyes closed, his breathing in quick pants. ‘Well, now you know. Funny that I should want to tell you when you’re on the run for something yourself. Or perhaps that’s why. But I still wanted to be on my own when I got here. You understand?’

  I nodded. To make his peace, he had said. I remembered that now. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I understand.’

  ‘Well, d’you think I did wrong?’ He waited. And then he said, ‘All right. I killed a man. But what would you have done? In the circumstances. Jarra Jarra ruined. Everything I’d dreamed of gone. And all the fault of that grasping little crook. And then slaughtering my camel for meat. Would you have stood for it? That camel had carried me for six days. She’d have carried me to her last gasp. She deserved better than that. And McIlroy – did he deserve anything better than I gave him?’ Another pause, and then he said slowly, ‘No. The camel was just an excuse, the spark that triggered my hate of the man.’ He was silent then and I didn’t know what to say. What would I have done?

  ‘I think,’ I said slowly, that I might have killed him the moment I came up with him.’

  I don’t know whether he heard that or not. As I have said, he was living his own private hell and I doubt whether it made any difference what I said. I was merely his confessor, and only because I happened to be there and had problems of my own.

  ‘It was ’bout six in the morning when I went down to the blacks’ quarters to get Weeli. I was running a new fenceline and I wanted Weeli and two of the boys. But he wasn’t there. Father had come for him ’bout two hours back. I found the old man in his den, a bottle of whisky in front of him and his eyes bleary with drink and lack of sleep.’ He paused for breath, licking his lips, his tongue coming out but no moisture there. ‘He lied to me,’ he went on slowly. ‘That’s what got my dander up right at the outset. I knew very well Weelie hadn’t gone walkabout.’ He found some saliva, licked his lips again, speaking fast now: ‘It took me the better part of an hour to get the truth out of him and by then I was so darned mad I’d have killed McIlroy with my bare hands – if he’d still been around. It took me six days – six days on a camel to catch up with him. It’s a long ride from Jarra Jarra here, the days burning hot, the nights beginning to cool. Autumn, y’see. It was March. All that time to think what I’d do if ever I caught up with him. Lucky for me it rained, the tracks of that old Austin truck of his showing quite clearly wherever the sand was soft.’

  He stopped there, staring in space. ‘At the end of six days’ riding camel the desire to kill the man was overlaid by a lot of other things – the loneliness, the feeling of being lost at times, like travelling in a vacuum. And when it came to the moment … when I was standing here, confronting him … all I could think of was water. I hadn’t had any water for more than twenty-four hours; all the way from the Stock Route I hadn’t found a single soak. I was down there in the sand, lapping it up, the camels bellowing. And the blarney of the man, that damned tongue of his pouring out excuses, explanations, encouraging me to believe that it would all turn out for the best. He and I, we’d go on together. No need for the camels now. And we’d return rich. His Monster would solve every thing.’

  He gave the ghost of a laugh, half amused, half cynical. ‘Instead of killing him I went to sleep in the middle of his monologue, too damned tired even to give him the hiding that would have got some of the hate out of my system.’

  He paused again there, and then after a moment he said quietly, in a flat, even voice: ‘It was still there, y’see – the hate I mean – all ready to explode inside me the moment that shot woke me.’

  ‘You buried the body?’

  He nodded. ‘In soft sand at the edge of the rira here. A sort of natural grave between two exposed edges of rock. Then Weeli and I started back. I got the Austin almost to Lake Disappointment. But the axle bust. There wasn’t much petrol left anyway. I dumped the old bus there and we made it back to Jarra Jarra by camel, travelling at night so nobody would see us. Father dealt with Weeli – made him swear never to tell a soul what had happened. Did it at the sacred place of his ancestors down in the Watersnake country. And then the cave-in – the last hope gone. After that the old man started drinking in earnest. McIlroy had broken him anyway. I got the hell out into the army. There was talk, of course. But nothing more. Four months had passed, the tracks covered by the time the police found that vehicle. And then the war, and we were overseas – boys from the outstations getting killed and captured. McIlroy’s death wasn’t important any more.’ His voice faded, his eyes staring blankly. ‘Sometimes I wish I’d killed him the moment I saw him strutting towards me. Other times I try to make-believe I never rode into the desert after him. The first would have been more honest. The second is what I’ve tried to live. Then Westrop, those rumours … after thirty years. I had to come.’

  ‘Why?’

  He looked at me with a puzzled frown. ‘To see if it was true, of course. I didn’t know. After all those years I couldn’t be sure I really had killed him. Burma. Hospital the old man’s death. It was in the Journal, of course. It was all there, just as I had told it to him. But once I’d burned those pages … And then Janet’s mother, the years of trying to rebuild and make something of the station. It faded, y’see. It wasn’t real. Just something I’d read.’ And then haltingly: ‘The old man, y’see – out of his mind. You can’t live with a thought like that.’ There was perspiration on his brow, his face twitching and the effort of trying to put it all into words too much for him, his whole frame shivering.

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Now I know.’ His voice was back to a whisper. ‘Now I can’t fool myself any more. What I did – it finished him, broke him completely.’

  ‘The body, I mean – you found it?’

  ‘Not the body.’ He shook his head. ‘Not even the skeleton. He was just carrion as soon as the sand had blown off him, and the wedge-tails and the ants, they picked him clean. All that was left was a heap of bones, but lying exactly where I remembered, and of course it all came back to me then. No room for doubt or self-deception any more.’

  Silence and my head dropping on to my chest, my eyes closing; the rustle of sand grains moving, the heat winds stirring the desert. I should have said it didn’t matter any more. I should have encouraged him, given him the support he needed. But I was too tired, too bone-weary to care. What the hell did it matter after all these years? I was drifting into sleep, but not yet losing consciousness, the silence nagging. ‘And now,’ I muttered. ‘Now you’ve found him, what are you going to do?’

  He didn’t answer, the silence heavy between us so that I was forced back to consciousness, my eyes open. He hadn’t moved, his head still framed by that strange motif on the rock wall behind him, his eyes open and staring vacantly, his breathing shallow. He looked like death. It should have warned me. But I hadn’t come all this way to worry about a man who had died thirty years ago. I was thinking of Janet and Jarra Jarra and what a real big strike could do to get them out of the mess they were in. I thought, God help me, it was the future, not the past, that mattered, and so I said, ‘Well, what about McIlroy’s Monster? Does it exist or doesn’t it?’ I thought it would help to concentrate his mind on something practical.

  Silence still and I had to repeat the question before he turned his head and looked at me, his eyes still vacant as though fixed on some far distant horizon. Slowly he shifted his position, groping in the hip pocket of his trousers. ‘That’s something I shall never know.’ And he handed me a worn leather wallet. ‘I took that from McIlroy’s body.’ And then he said something I didn’t understand till much later: ‘If it exists, and if you find it, pray to God for guidance. This poor country has been raped too often by greedy whites and that – that Monster – belongs to them, to the aborigine of the desert.’ And he added softly, ‘I would like to think that my boyhood dream could be made a reality. Yes, I would like to think that, very much. I had it all planned – Jarra Jarra a nature reserve, the goodn
ess of the land gradually restored and the blacks free to live their natural, self-sufficient lives. His breath came in a sigh: ‘It was just a dream, and dreams fade y’know – with age and the passage of time. But you’re young. You can still make it a reality.’ And then, looking at me very directly with those startling blue eyes: ‘Any man who uses that for his own ends will suffer a violent death. Or else he’ll end up with blood on his hands. I don’t know why I know that, but I do.’

  I was fully awake then. ‘So you think it exists?’

  He nodded his head slowly. ‘Yes. Yes, I do.’ And after that he wouldn’t say any more. He seemed exhausted, leaning back, his eyes closed. I didn’t examine the contents of the wallet. Not then. I just put it in my pocket, wondering whether he was sane or not, thinking about his words, the strange prophetic sense he had intended them to convey. And shortly afterwards Tom came to tell us there was a storm brewing. He had blankets with him and he wrapped one of them around Ed Garrety, tucking it in carefully as though he were nursing a sick child.

  The wind came quickly, sand driving past our shelter, at first a river of small grains close to the surface of the rock, then a brown cloud engulfing everything, uprooted bushes whirling past, the air thickening until it was hardly possible to breathe, the sun-hot desert sand-blasted to hell. I buried my head in the blanket and sank into a mental oblivion, unable to think, scarcely able to breathe, yet not unconscious – not entirely.

  The storm lasted right into the night. I was dimly conscious of movement, a body crawling past, but I was wrapped in a cocoon of misery and hardly noticed, lying there thankful for the shelter of the rock which protected my body from the full blast of the wind, the sand flood pouring over me and nothing to do but huddle close within the insufferable heat of the blanket.

  It died at last, the howling of the wind subsiding slowly to a moan, the sand-filled air thinning till there was only the whisper of a breeze and the soft abrasive rasp of grains on rock. That was when I first realized I was alone.

  It took time for it to sink in, and even when it did, I didn’t do anything. I was dazed and too exhausted. It was dark and the wind had gone, everything very still. My voice croaked his name. No answer, and when I reached out there was only the blanket half-buried in sand.

  I got up then in a sudden panic. My limbs were cramped, my eyes and mouth all scummed, and as I staggered out a meteor, blazing a snuffed-out trail across the sky, showed me the Land-Rover still there. I stood for a moment, trembling with relief, and then, thinking perhaps he had been caught short and gone for a squat, I walked over to the Land-Rover and got myself a drink of water. I sipped it slowly, flexing my limbs and shaking the sand out of my clothes. The minutes passed and no sign of him. I started calling, but there was no answer. Tom had appeared like a dark shadow out of the ground, and after a while, with no response to our calls, we began searching.

  We must have searched for an hour before giving up, and by then I knew it wasn’t an accident. He’d walked out into that sandstorm deliberately. Tom knew it, too. ‘Him sickfella golonga tingari.’ Tingari I guessed correctly were Dreamtime spirits. The old black didn’t talk much. He accepted it, may even have expected it, but he was deeply affected. He went off by himself and I didn’t see him again till dawn broke. Then we searched the whole of the rira and beyond it, out into the sand, until heat exhaustion drove me to seek shelter. Tom was all day searching, but without finding a trace of him. It was as though that storm had lifted him up and spirited him away.

  Night fell again and we had a meal. Then we collected the things we needed from the Land-Rover and began walking. There was no point in staying there. No point in continuing the search. The sand had done what perhaps he had intended; it had buried him under a clean new drift. But why? Why had he gone like that, walking out into a sandstorm? I was thinking about it all night, feeling there was something I had missed. And then, as tiredness made me stumble and I began to fall, I developed a strange feeling that he and I had changed places; one moment I felt that all the problems that had sent him stumbling out into the storm had devolved upon me, the next it was I who was stumbling out into the desert to die.

  I wouldn’t have made it without Tom. He stayed with me, and sometimes he talked to himself in his own tongue, not bothering with pidgin. In the end, all I could think about was the compass, which I clutched so tightly for fear I lost it in a fall that my fingers eventually had to be prised loose from it, the bone all bruised by the metal case. We kept to the reverse of the bearing I had followed two nights before, but when dawn broke and I flung myself down exhausted on the highest sandridge I could find, Tom said he didn’t think we had gone far enough yet, not more than nine miles, and so we went on, out into a wide plain between that ridge and the next with the heat increasing and the sky flaring to the moment of sunrise. And he was right. When the sun came up behind us the black of Kennie’s smoke signal was no more than a wisp far out on the horizon. It took us almost two hours – two hours before Kennie came stumbling towards us, shouting hysterically.

  Another long day waiting out the heat, and then, the sun just dipping below the sand-sea horizon, we started driving, heading straight into the last of the daylight. There were new drifts of sand now, the going bad in places and frequent stops to cool the engine. We had two punctures that night and we only made 42 miles, a lot of it in four-wheel drive.

  ‘You in a more reasonable frame of mind?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Tom had rigged us a shelter of sorts and Kennie was propped up on one elbow, staring at me, his sun-blistered body chequered with the light beams coming through the furze.

  ‘You were pretty crazed when I found you yesterday morning.’

  ‘You didn’t find us. We found you.’

  ‘Have it your own way.’

  My hands gripped hard on the mug I was holding. ‘All right,’ I said, my mouth, my whole throat hurting. ‘You lit a fire so we knew where you were.’ The mug was hot, the tea too scalding to drink, and I was sweating, a feeling of nausea creeping up from my guts.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘All you said was he walked out into that sandstorm.’

  ‘That’s right.’ My throat was sore and I found it difficult to formulate my words.

  ‘Christ, man. You can’t just leave it at that. There must be something more.’

  I shook my head and then he was leaning forward, gripping my arm. ‘For God’s sake, Alec – a man doesn’t just walk out – into a sandstorm – for no reason. That’s what you said. That he just walked out. While you were huddled in a blanket.’

  There was a long silence. Finally he let go of my arm. ‘You don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘No.’ How the hell could I explain to him the complicated motives of a man who had reached the point of no return. Even if I understood them myself.

  He sucked noisily at his tea. ‘Okay, I’m your pal and you won’t talk to me. So what are you going to tell the police? And there’s Janet. What are you going to tell Janet?’

  Oh Christ! I thought. Couldn’t he leave it alone? Just accept the truth of it. ‘God damn you,’ I muttered. ‘Shut up, can’t you.’ That strange feeling was there still, the feeling that Ed Garrety and I had changed places, that with his death I had somehow stepped into his shoes. ‘It’s crazy.’ I heard my voice, a hoarse whisper, and he had heard it too.

  ‘Did you find the Monster? Was it there, where he died?’ He was staring at me intently.

  ‘No. No, of course it wasn’t.’

  ‘Then why did Garrety stop there – a rira Tom said. That’s a geological formation.’

  ‘There was no copper,’ I said. ‘Now shut up, can’t you.’

  ‘But you know where it is?’

  ‘Shut up, for Christ’s sake,’ I screamed at him.

  His hand was on my arm again, shaking me. ‘He told you, didn’t he? You got it out of him – the location of McIlroy’s Monster?’

  Something in the way he said it m
ade me hold my breath, staring at him. ‘What the hell are you getting at?’ In that moment I hated him.

  He saw that, for he hesitated, licking his lips. And then he blurted out, ‘Only that you got the rotor arm out of him, and I thought …’

  ‘You stupid, mean-minded little fool!’ He was cringing away from me, scared of my anger and the croaking fury of my voice ‘What the hell do you know about a man like Ed Garrety? He didn’t go into the desert after the Monster …’ I stopped there, leaning back, panting. Christ! The boy was right. If Ed Garrety wasn’t prospecting, then what the hell was he doing? I was thinking of Janet then, wondering how I could ever face her if I came out of the Gibson saying her father had taken his life because of a murder he had committed thirty years ago.