Moonlight Downs

by Adrian Hyland

  ‘Nance!’

  As he passed through the lounge room he presumably came across Charles and Jason. ‘Jesus!’ I heard him exclaim, ‘they’ve overrun the place!’

  When he reached the kitchen I heard snatches of heated conversation.

  ‘But Earl, you told me to expect the lawyers…’

  ‘Fuck, Nance…’

  ‘Earl…’ A low, dangerous note resonated in her voice, a note which told me there was an unsuspected steel blade inside that flowery red sheath and that one of the causes in which it was brandished was decent language.

  After a moment’s silence he tried another tack. ‘These aren’t my lawyers, hon, they’re the blackfellers’ lawyers…’

  ‘Earl, you know my opinion on this matter. I couldn’t care less if they’re the devil’s dentists. Right now, they are our guests; they’ve had a nasty experience and I’ve invited…’

  The door was closed, the conversation reduced to muffled undertones.

  I cast a quick eye round the office. What was I looking for? I had no idea: anything that would give me any insight into Marsh and his dealings with Moonlight. I knew he was pissed off about the land claim; had something tipped him over the edge?

  I had a quick rummage through the papers on his desk: statements and accounts, reports from stock agents, pamphlets about forthcoming shows and field days. Marsh even had an out-tray. I riffled through it. He was as terse with the word processor as he was with the mouth, but there was a surprising order to the paperwork. Nothing there was more than a few days old, which suggested that the filing cabinet against the wall could be a useful source of information.

  Once again, things there were in surprisingly good order. ‘Moonlight Downs’ had its own folder, and it was chock-a-block, with everything arranged in neat, chronological order. From the cursory glance that was all I had at my disposal, most of the stuff in it looked old, written in the heat of the land claim process. As I knew, Marsh had been heavily involved, playing the aggrieved neighbour card for all it was worth: he’d written numerous letters, reports and statements objecting to the claim, both to the court and to the press, as well as to other locals who believed they were in the same boat. Each of his contributions was carefully dated and filed. He even had a copy of the judge’s final report, heavily underscored and highlighted, the margins riddled with angry comments.

  At the other end of the corridor I heard the kitchen door open. A momentary silence ensued, then I picked up the sound of Marsh introducing himself to my companions in a manner that could almost be called civil. To Charles I heard him say: ‘We got business to discuss, but maybe it’d be better if we left it till the mornin…’

  I heard Charles politely concurring, then Marsh went quiet. Looking around for me? How long did I have left? Not long.

  I flipped through the folder until I came to the more recent stuff. There was surprisingly little of it; evidently he’d quietened down when the land was handed over. Had he accepted it and moved on, or had the anger sunk into his inner being and begun to rot, like the metal splinter that disappears into the body, festers and throbs, and then one day bursts forth in a shower of pus?

  I detected the sound of heavy bare feet padding down the hallway. One last letter came to hand. The letterhead was ‘Department of Regional Development’, the ‘Re:’ was Moonlight Downs, the date a couple of weeks before Lincoln’s death. It was signed ‘Lance Massie, Regional Manager’.

  Lance Massie. I remembered the name. How had Kenny Trigger described this bloke? As the right-wing Territory government’s bagman. I quickly scanned the contents: it seemed to be offering to help Marsh in his negotiations with Moonlight, but so deep was the bureaucratic bullshit in which the writing was mired that it wasn’t immediately obvious what the negotiations were about. The hand-written PS at the bottom of the page caught my attention: ‘We’ll work with you on this one Earl, but your main obstacle is going to be, as ever, Lincoln bloody Flinders. Stay strong and true! Lance.’

  The footsteps were almost upon me. I closed the cabinet, slipped back into the armchair, sensed him in the doorway. I stared at the screen, nervously cracking my fingers and wondering how much he’d seen.

  The secret ingredient

  MARSH SNORTED, and I looked around.

  ‘Just catching up on my Wiggles, Mr Marsh.’

  He shifted from one bare foot to another, his blue eyes sweeping the room, his face frozen in its customary scarlet scowl. Had he seen me at the filing cabinet? Was he trying to decide which limb to tear off first?

  ‘Dinner’s ready,’ was all he said, then he added, ‘but I’m not. Just gonna put some clothes on.’

  He turned on his heels and walked away.

  I closed my eyes, sighed with relief, then joined the others in the dining room.

  As we were sitting down at the table there came a heavy footfall from the direction of the veranda and a knock on the front door. Alyssia went out to investigate, and came back with yet another pilot and legal team. The real ones, this time, Greg and Neville. A couple of disgruntled, balding company types in dusty white shirts and Akubra hats who looked pissed off that they’d had to walk in from the airstrip.

  Marsh was almost apologetic. ‘I told the mechanic to bring yez in, but’—with an accusatory glance in my direction—‘he prob’ly thought he already had. Anyhow…’ the smile on his face was like a flower struggling to survive on a rocky desert outcrop, ‘yer just in time for a feed.’

  There followed one of the stranger evenings of my life. A more heterogeneous dinner party one would be hard pressed to find: black and white, left and right, women and men, young and old, educated and un, New and First Australian, but we struggled to find a common ground, as you do.

  The leaven in the mix was the Marsh’s daughter—Amelia, as she turned out to be—who sat in her high chair regaling us with tales of her imaginary friends. The isolation of the outback was obviously proving a rich breeding ground for her imagination. Her closest acquaintance was a little creature called Treebark, who had green hair and parents named Slugger and Duania, Slugger being the mother. An oblique comment, perhaps, upon relationships within her own family and the cause of an arched brow and the shadow of a smile from Marsh.

  Amelia seemed to take a particular shine to me, and between courses dragged me out into the yard to meet her chooks, Eyesore— because it had a sore eye—and Bottlesharp, because its feathers were the colour of broken glass. Treebark, she assured me, was watching us from the ghost gums down by the creek. She also introduced me to a talking calf named Bruce. When I asked what Bruce could say, she had words with the calf, which did indeed respond, making a noise which Amelia translated as: ‘I want to go to the ocean on a train.’

  The real surprise of the evening, though, was Marsh himself. Whatever the reason—his wife’s old-world notion of hospitality, the kicking-in of the Bundy rum to which he liberally treated himself, maybe the mollifying presence of the Beautiful Girl—his anger slowly faded, his spirits rose and he began to open up. Indeed, in his own bearish manner, he was the life of the party, the monolith around which the natives were expected to dance.

  He sat at the head of the table, glass in hand, elbow on the table, leaning forward and fixing various members of the party with his powerful blue stare, badgering us with questions, then cutting off our replies with his own opinions, most of which were carefully calculated to offend somebody in the room. He launched scathing attacks on lawyers to the pilots, pilots to the lawyers, and blackfellers to all and sundry, always making sure that the lawyers, pilots and black woman in the room heard every word.

  At different times throughout the evening I heard him arguing land rights with Charles, debating the interconnectedness of market and drought cycles with his own lawyers, grumbling about the effects of heli-mustering on cattle condition with the pilots. He related a rambling story about some emu, a station pet, which apparently thought it was a cattle-dog. He was full of bullshit about min-min lights, prairie
oysters, bush aphrodisiacs and pointed bones, the last with a malicious eye in my direction.

  The one group who were apparently immune from criticism was Pommy migrants. Nance bustled around, making sure we were all fed and watered, but keeping a quiet eye upon her man. Once or twice, when he looked like he was about to stray beyond the bounds of propriety, she’d flash a warning signal, but more often she was encouraging, obviously familiar with the performance.

  When Neville, one of the lawyers, showed signs of a cold, Nance said something to Marsh about his bush remedy. I smiled to myself. These guys always have a bush remedy. Minutes later I was watching Neville miserably contemplating a concoction made up of lemon concentrate, chilli pepper, Worcestershire sauce and ‘the mystery ingredient’. There’s always a mystery ingredient, too. From the look on the lawyer’s face when he drained the glass, it might have been sump oil.

  From scattered fragments of the conversation I learnt a little about Marsh’s personal history, and, again, it wasn’t what I’d imagined. As owner of the station, of course, he was the Enemy— blokes like him had been riding roughshod over my mob for centuries—but he wasn’t to the Big House born. Far from being sensitive about his past, he seemed to revel in it. His old man had been a drover and a drunkard over Winton way, his mother, when she wasn’t on the road or up to her elbows in babies, a cleaner in the local pub. Indeed, his background was not that different from my own. The main difference, of course, was in the colour of our respective mothers, but even there I found myself reflecting that the black and white trash often had more in common than either of us would want to admit.

  I felt the similarity more strongly than ever when Marsh stuck an old Slim Dusty record on the stereo. Charles’ upper lip curled; he looked more like a Nick Cave man. Fat chance, I thought. If Nick Cave had wandered into a gathering like this they’d have trussed him, stuffed him and eaten him for the main course. Nance was presumably responsible for the Celine Dion CDs on the bottom shelf. The company lawyers’ concept of country looked like it didn’t stray too far from Shania Twain.

  When ‘Leave Him Out There in the Long Yard’ came on, Charles was discussing a recent High Court appeal with Greg and I saw him roll his eyes and mouth the word ‘monotonous’. Marsh was busily swapping fishing stories with the pilots, but I saw from the light that flared in his eyes that he’d noticed the comment as well.

  ‘Monotonous?’ he boomed. ‘Whadderye expect? He’s singin about the bush!’

  He took a noisy swig of rum, and then, when he had everybody’s attention, repeated ‘Monotonous!’ in such a way as to leave you in no doubt that, limited though Slim’s vocal and narrative range might have seemed, there were as many permutations and possibilities within its parameters as there were in the bush itself.

  Marsh turned out to be something of an expert on the subject of old Slim. He glared at me suspiciously when I expressed my admiration, but when he saw that my interest was genuine, he took me through his collection. It was a treasure trove: over sixty albums, many of them seventy-eights, some of them signed. He’d met the Great Man—not just at some stage-door signature-fest, but out bush, on the road. The first time he was a bung-eyed kid in his father’s droving camp when Slim dropped by in his famous homemade caravan.

  ‘You take all these,’ he said, waving a hand out over the collection, ‘add em up and whadderye got? Ya got a story. Our story,’ he said with added emphasis, though I had my doubts as to whether or not he was including me in the ‘our’.

  Fair enough, I thought to myself as I was lying in bed that night, but the description inevitably reminded me of Lincoln Flinders. He was another story man, but that didn’t stop some bastard killing him.

  Nothing I’d learnt about Marsh in the last few hours had swayed me from the suspicion that he might well have been that bastard.

  Indeed, what I’d learnt about him probably increased the likelihood of his being the killer. I knew him and his ilk: they tended to take the law into their own hands, strike first. It was a brutal, semi-civilised world out there, and Marsh was born and bred into it. They treated the blackfellers worse than they treated their dogs, and I’d already seen how he treated dogs.

  I lay there, listening to the sounds of the night: distant generator humming, cicadas whirring away in the poincianas, the occasional night-bird calling: boobooks, nightjars. Something that sounded like a sea-gull, though God help it if it was.

  What was wrong with my scenario? I was drifting off to sleep when it struck me: it wasn’t the violence—he’d be more than capable of it if anybody got in his way, and from the glimpse I’d had of the letter from Lance Massie, Lincoln had clearly done that. My problem was the subterfuge: the knife in the night, the attempt to pass the death off as a ritual killing. That was what didn’t seem in keeping with what I’d seen of the man. If it was, then he was an even more cunning bastard than I could ever have imagined. It was still possible, of course; but it didn’t feel right.

  The meeting the next morning proved to be something of an anti-climax. We gathered together in the station office, everybody embarrassed by our intimacy of the night before except Marsh, who seemed impervious to such feelings.

  The whole thing was carried out with much greater restraint than would normally have been the case. Charles presented Marsh with a court order to remove his stock from the North Quarter, Marsh responded in kind: he had a letter, drafted by his lawyers, which demanded compensation for damaged fencing, gates and roads, and an offer to withdraw the claim in return for a formal lease of the same section of land. Charles replied, as everyone present had known that he would, by saying that such a request would have to go to the traditional owners, but that, until then, the court order would need to be obeyed. Marsh didn’t look too happy, but nor did he look surprised.

  Twenty minutes after the meeting finished, our back-up plane arrived and we headed for Bluebush.

  When I got back to town I tracked down McGillivray, found him in his office, told him that Marsh was back home, and that if he wanted to look into Marsh’s connection with Moonlight, he could do worse than begin with Lance Massie.

  He pinched the bridge of his nose, closed his eyes then looked up at me resignedly. ‘Lemme get this straight. You not only want me to investigate Earl Marsh, prominent land owner and growing cheese in the Territory Cattlemen’s Association. You want me to include in that investigation the local manager of the Department of Regional Development?’

  ‘That’s about it,’ I said, not without some sympathy.

  He sighed, leaned forward, head on palms, ran his fat fingers through what was left of his hair and muttered something he’d been muttering a lot lately.

  ‘Emily, Emily, Emily…’

  The captain of the World

  I LEFT McGillivray to his despair and raced down to the White Dog, just in time to begin my shift. I came home at sundown, washed-out and exhausted. Between mad sorcerers, crashing planes and blustering cattlemen, it had been a hell of a week.

  And it wasn’t over yet. I’d only been in the shower for twenty minutes when I was disturbed by a mighty thump on the front door and a roaring rendition of my name.

  Jack was back in town.

  I stepped out of the shower, threw a towel around my hair and a robe around my body, opened the door.

  ‘Hi, Jack.’

  ‘Hijack! That’s about what a bloke’s gotta do to see his own family these days. I’ve been standing here for ten minutes.’

  ‘Sorry, Dad. You wouldn’t believe the week I’ve had. Come in.’

  He began to gather up the pile of rubbish he’d left by the door: as well as the usual monstrous swag, he had an overnight bag, a tin of rock samples, a carton of beer and a box full of fresh food.

  ‘Never did master the art of travelling light, did you, Jack?’

  ‘Figured it was my turn to make dinner,’ he explained with a devilish grin, putting the food on the kitchen table. ‘Look after my little girl.’

  ‘Mm
mm. I could handle that. What’s on the menu?’

  ‘Irish stew.’

  ‘Sounds good.’ I settled back on the couch as he poured himself a beer and began bustling about the kitchen. ‘Maybe you could put a little less whisky and a few more vegies in it than you used to.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said in his usual self-assured manner. ‘I know how to move with the times.’ He reached into the box and I glimpsed a little white Gladbag out of the corner of my eye.

  I sat up. ‘Cocaine?’ I asked.

  ‘Tofu,’ he grinned.

  ‘You’re going to put tofu in an Irish stew?’

  ‘Had this hippy come and work for me last year. He put it in everything. Got quite partial to it. Good for the figure,’ he added, ruefully patting his stomach.

  ‘I think I’d rather stick to the peas and potatoes; I’d even prefer parsnip to tofu.’

  He looked a little offended. ‘But I thought you’d like it—all those hairy-legged women you been hanging round with in Melbourne.’

  ‘They weren’t that hairy, Jack, and they weren’t all women. But don’t worry, I’m sure it’ll be delicious.’

  ‘What about this then?’ He pulled a brand-new blender out of the box. ‘Banana smoothies for breakfast?’

  ‘God, that hippy really taught you a thing or two.’

  An hour later we were weighing into the stew. ‘You haven’t lost your touch,’ I assured him. ‘Tofu notwithstanding. So how long are you in town for?’

  ‘Not long. Heading out for Green Swamp first thing in the morning.’

  ‘Sounds exciting.’ Green Swamp was a leprous roadhouse a hundred and eighty k’s out west: its distinguishing features were the largest collection of beer coasters in the southern hemisphere, a wall full of fading photographs in which tits, bums and billiard cues were heavily represented and Barney Kipper, who for twenty years had maintained the region’s phone lines from his own stool in the bar. ‘What’s on out there?’