Lunch with a Soldier

by Derek Hansen

  Billy had gone out looking for emu eggs on his own often enough and knew to keep a sharp lookout for the male birds, which had the job of incubating the eggs and could be fiercely protective. Whenever he found a male hanging around, he’d try to scare it off by throwing sticks and shouting. If that didn’t work, he’d leave the eggs alone and try his luck the following day. Mostly he hunted eggs with either Neil or Rodney because that made things easier. If there was a bird around, one of them could distract it while the other swooped on the prize. But today he had the rifle instead of company. The .22 and the three bullets in his pocket gave him all the confidence he needed. One shot would scare off any bird and leave him a couple of bullets in case he got the chance to nail a pig. The idea of shooting a pig without dogs or anyone to help appealed to him. He’d really have something to brag about, so long as it never got back to his parents.

  He checked the position of the sun above the horizon and calculated that he had about two hours of light left. Two hours wasn’t much time to track down anything, but it was enough if you knew where to look and certainly long enough to gather up a few emu eggs. The big birds mostly laid around seven to ten eggs and Billy never took more than three from the same nest, partly out of consideration for the parents but mainly because three was all he ever needed. He consoled himself with the thought that emus couldn’t count and, so long as there were still eggs in the nest to hatch, the birds were happy. The only time he really felt anything for emus was when he found them hanging from fences they’d tried to jump over. The birds died a horrible, slow death when they caught their toes in the top strand and hooked their heels on the second. The twist in the two wires trapped their legs so tightly there was little possibility of escape.

  He startled a flock of galahs in the buffle grass, feeding on seed, and watched as they rose shrieking only to settle fifty metres away and continue feeding. Billy couldn’t recall a time when there’d been so many birds. The scrub thickened around the edges of the warrambool but it was still easy going for the horse. Billy rode to the point where he’d observed the emus and dismounted, leaving Grasshopper in a bit of a clearing where it could graze if it wanted to or simply lie down. He thought briefly about tethering it but the stockhorses were well trained and knew to stay put. If it did decide to wander, he figured it wouldn’t wander far and certainly not in the short time he expected to be away. He checked the sun. He still had about an hour and a quarter of light. Half an hour to find an egg and three-quarters of an hour to ride back home.

  Billy put a bullet in the chamber, checked that the safety was on and began his search. Emus had left tracks everywhere so it wasn’t so much a matter of following them as trying to work out where their nests were likely to be. Emus weren’t especially particular about where they nested, but they did tend to favour small depressions and hollows and it was these that Billy looked for. The blacks always knew where to look and he fancied that his ‘abo eyes’ put him on a par with them.

  Billy tensed when he spotted the pig tracks. He could tell they were recent because they overlaid the tracks of the emus. He slowed his walk and looked carefully around. There were plenty of scars where emus had gouged the ground looking for insects, but that wasn’t what he was looking for. His eyes soon picked out the darker-coloured soil and the holes where a pig had been rooting under bushes. His excitement began to build. A pig and emu eggs all on his own and all in the one afternoon would be too much. It occurred to him that the pigs probably fancied a meal of emu eggs themselves, which meant the male birds would more than likely be on guard over their nests. Standing one-point-five metres tall, weighing up to fifty kilos and with big, powerful three-toed feet as weapons, the emus were intimidating opponents.

  Billy spotted a male emu about forty metres away, in a slight depression just as he’d expected. Only its dark grey head was visible. The quick short movements of its head suggested that it had seen or heard something and was on the lookout. Billy was certain it was sitting on eggs and began to circle towards it using the thicker clumps of bush and thorns for cover. His plan was simple. He intended to get as close as possible before firing a bullet into a branch above the bird’s head. Emus could run at fifty kilometres an hour and Billy figured the bird would get such a shock it would probably hit fifty before the report of his shot had died.

  Because he was concentrating so hard on the emu he didn’t pick up the snorts of the pig as soon as he should have, but he heard the lignum explode in front of him and knew before he even sighted the pig that he had only seconds to react. He brought the rifle up to his shoulder, flicked off the safety and aimed at the sound, tracking with it as the grey-black blur crashed into the clear. He stood his ground as he always did, making sure of his shot, making sure to aim between the bones of the shoulders, making sure his bullet penetrated the beast’s heart. He fired, certain of his accuracy but not of the speed of his reactions. This pig didn’t collapse at his feet. In fact, it barely slowed. It barrelled into his legs with the force of a runaway locomotive.

  Billy was sent flying up and backwards into the base of a coolibah. The force of hitting the trunk punched the air out of his lungs and caused him to drop the rifle. He knew he was hurt but wasted no time thinking about it. Despite the pain in his legs and chest, he reached instinctively into his pocket for another bullet, snatched his rifle up off the ground and rammed the bullet into the chamber. Time was everything. Everything! Where was the pig? Where was the pig!

  He found it three metres away to his side and slightly behind him, a big brute of a boar, still standing head down, scuffing the ground with a front hoof as it prepared for another charge. For a moment, astonishment vied with Billy’s fear. A big boar! He hadn’t been expecting such a major trophy. But why wasn’t the beast dead? Why was it still standing? Billy was certain of his shot and the blood spilling down the boar’s shoulders seemed to confirm his accuracy. But this pig was so much bigger than the others he’d shot and it suddenly occurred to him that maybe his .22 wasn’t up to the job. Billy tried to roll over on his stomach so he could prop on his elbows and make sure of his second shot up through the beast’s chest, but his legs didn’t want to respond. The pig started towards him, wobbled, started again. Billy tried desperately to pivot around from the waist, tried to drag his legs into a position where he could bed the rifle into his right shoulder and aim. But his body rebelled and failed to respond. The boar charged. Billy screamed. His only chance was to shoot blind and hope his bullet struck something vital. Just as he began to squeeze the trigger the boar’s front legs gave way. It pitched head first into the ground, collapsed and lay there mere centimetres from his face, kicking, frothing, squealing … and dying.

  Billy dragged himself up so he could lean against the trunk of the coolibah. Feeling was gradually coming back into his legs and with it came the worst pain he’d ever experienced. His jeans were dark with blood below the knees and he knew the pig had caught him good. Even as it had hit him he’d sensed that it had tossed its head to rip with its tusks. But how much damage had it done? He tried to stand, but abandoned the attempt immediately as a wave of pain engulfed him. He began to sob quietly, not just because of the pain and shock but because of the hopelessness of his situation. There was another golden rule he’d broken — the golden rule — one drummed into every outback kid from the time they could walk. Always tell someone where you’re going.

  Billy forced himself to stop sobbing and to take stock of his situation. How many times had Neil told him that the key to solving problems lay in understanding them? The trouble was, the more he understood the more frightened he became. He’d told nobody where he was going. He couldn’t move and nobody even had a clue where to start looking for him. His shot had probably scared off all the other pigs in the vicinity, but he knew they’d be back. The locals hated pigs not just for the damage they did to the land, but because they didn’t wait for fallen sheep or cattle to die before they started eating them. Billy was all too aware of where he stood o
n that score. He was bleeding, immobile and vulnerable.

  What if the pigs came for him?

  What if they tried to eat him alive?

  Chapter Eighteen

  Billy sat facing north on his veranda, his feet in their customary position up on the rail. His mug, drained of tea, sat alongside the apricot jam tin. A rollie burned slowly between his fingers. The late April sun burned off the light drizzle which had done little more than freshen up the pastures. Nevertheless, they had a good cover of grass and clover, which augured well for winter. Billy didn’t have a lot on his plate. The sheep were freshly shorn and protected against flystrike and the steers were fattening nicely. The only thing concerning him was Linda.

  For the past four months they’d been seeing as much of each other as circumstances permitted, but they hadn’t permitted much. She’d gone away to Bali with her daughter for a month over the December-January holidays and had spent a week in Dubbo twice since then. When she was back home, often it was his work — first the mustering, then the mulesing, the paring away of the wrinkles and folds of skin around the lambs’ hindquarters, and finally the shearing — that kept them apart. Billy was acutely aware that they’d see a lot more of each other if she moved in and was at a loss to understand why she hadn’t. She’d admitted that she loved him and he’d admitted he loved her. That had surprised him because he couldn’t remember ever telling anyone that he loved them before. He supposed he must have told his wife at some stage before she left him, but if he had he doubted that he’d really meant it. Not like he meant it with Linda. That was the thing. That was the crux. He’d meant it. She’d meant it. Yet she still resisted his invitation to move in. She was still his tenant, someone who paid him rent, and he was damned if he knew why.

  He understood that she didn’t want to involve him in her problems, but he was involved. How could he not be involved when he loved her? How could she possibly be safer on her own than under his protection? Off to the east, a flock of red-winged parrots settled into a stand of acacias. Their sharp, metallic contact calls were unmistakeable but for once Billy failed to notice them. He took a long drag on his rollie before butting it into his jam tin. Tea-break was over and he had work to do. Thinking about Linda was getting him nowhere.

  Billy was a few days late going into Walgett for supplies, but that happened when there was shearing to be done. Nevertheless, he was out of beer and potatoes and that meant Rodney was as well. He mentally raised the trip into Walgett to the top of his list of things to do tomorrow. He wandered over to his shed where he kept his poisons. Today he had rabbits to kill and warrens to rip up, tomorrow he had Walgett and he’d kept the day after free to do all the odd jobs he’d been putting off. His life was returning to the kind of order and familiarity he was accustomed to, except for the emptiness inside him and inside his home that desperately needed filling. She rang him every night and he looked forward to her calls, but they added to rather than solved his problem. In fact, the memory of her amazing laugh followed him around like an echo. After years of nothing there was now something, a justification for persevering, but it remained tantalisingly beyond his grasp. The emptiness nagged at him incessantly. Unfortunately there were no treatments in his shed that could rid him of that.

  Billy drove into Walgett without kicking up the customary comet tail. Enough moisture still held near the surface to lay the dust. He cashed Rodney’s pension cheque first, bought his supplies at the supermarket and made sure Jimmy was out and Peter on duty before calling into the stock and station. Billy didn’t need much and the main reason he dropped in was to find out who’d got the best of what little rain they’d had, how many centimetres and what was tipped to happen next. Peter claimed they could expect a few wet months, that the weather pattern was similar to the autumn of 1969. Billy could hardly argue. He’d spent the autumn of ’69 in another country with more important things on his mind.

  He wandered over to the RSL for a pie and a beer and a chat with anyone else who’d come into town. There was always someone and this day was no exception. He was enjoying a friendly conversation with some cockies who had properties near Collarenebri when Jimmy strolled into the bar. He spotted Billy almost immediately and ambled over with a smirk on his face.

  ‘G’day, boys,’ said Jimmy.

  Billy responded and managed not to show his irritation.

  ‘Seems I owe you an apology,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘Oh, yeah?’ said Billy. ‘What have you done?’

  ‘Me? Nothing. I’ve done nothing. It’s that city sheila I sent you.’

  ‘City sheila?’ said Billy. ‘Oh, yeah. I guess you mean the one I’ve got set up in a love nest.’

  ‘Yeah, sorry about that. Seems I got it wrong.’

  ‘Only took you eight months to figure that out.’

  ‘Anyhow, I saw her down in Dubbo a couple of weeks back. She was in the Country Club looking a million dollars, getting cosy with some city guy. He was pouring wine into her like he was on a promise.’ He slapped Billy on the back. ‘Bad luck, mate, but you can’t say I didn’t try my best for you.’

  Just like Vietnam, thought Billy, you never hear the bullet coming that gets you. The kelpie sat alongside him on the passenger seat, ears flat, sensing his mood. It had taken all of Billy’s self-control not to react when Jimmy had dropped his bombshell. He’d laughed. Ordered another round. Carried on like he’d carried on in Vietnam when all he wanted to do was scream and hide. He’d kept his emotions under tight control as he’d made his farewells, bought his slabs of beer and thrown them on the back of the ute. By the time he’d turned the ute around he no longer felt sickened to the point of despair and numbness had replaced shock. The hollowness inside him expanded into a void that knew no boundaries. He’d felt that way one other time, when he heard ‘Motsa’ had been killed in an ambush. Some of his mates claimed the sadness was always tinged with relief that someone else had copped it and not them. His emptiness then had been coupled with an overwhelming sense of disbelief, as though there’d been a mistake. Costa didn’t take risks. He was a backup man. He never went up the pointy end. Costa had borrowed ten bucks off him that morning to settle a debt and reckoned he was going to pay him back that night. He thought he still had a future.

  An acquaintance in a Toyota ute waved to Billy as he sped past towards Walgett. Billy’s wave in response brought him back to the present. He dared to recall what Jimmy had said to him and felt a wave of the same disbelief wash through him. He couldn’t reconcile the stock and station agent’s words with what he knew about Linda, what she said to him when they lay together in bed, what she said to him over the phone every night they were apart, how she felt about him and how he felt about her. If he had to choose to believe one over the other, Jimmy wouldn’t get a look-in. But why would Jimmy make up a story like that? What did he have to gain? Why would he bother when it could only put him in a situation of having to apologise? Nothing made sense. He consoled himself with the fact that Jimmy was a lowlife who liked dragging everybody down to his own level and whose observations were tainted and unreliable. So what if Linda had seen somebody down in Dubbo? There could be any number of explanations. Maybe she had other things to do there, things which required her to go for five days and which were none of his business. He was aware there were gaps in his knowledge of her, just as there were gaps in her knowledge of him. Billy did his best to be dismissive of Jimmy but his speculations led inexorably to the issue he found most difficult to deal with: why hadn’t she agreed to move in with him?

  Did it have anything to do with Dubbo?

  The emptiness inside him seemed bottomless.

  Chapter Nineteen

  A change came over Grant Sinclair the moment he began work on the Garuda project. He was back on familiar ground, with the kind of budget that suited his expertise, and he revelled in it. Staff who’d wondered why Cameron put up with him suddenly saw Grant in a new light and even the young directors, the boy wonders, glimpsed the greatness that
had once made him the hottest property in town. He pulled together an A-list crew which read like a directory of the best at their craft. He even managed to convince a lighting cameraman who’d gone to shoot features in Hollywood to come back as his director of photography. He tracked down fixers in Bali and Java who’d worked for other film crews and could act as local producers, smoothing the way with villagers and officials, negotiating payments for extras and for the use of locations and, importantly, arranging transport and local drivers. Grant rang people he hadn’t spoken to for years, sold them on the project and won their support. He was flying and nobody, least of all the agency creatives, could remain unaffected by his enthusiasm.

  Grant worked as hard on the agency people as he did on any other aspect of his quote. He kept them up to date with developments and won them over with the grandeur of his ideas, the visual touches and effects that made great images exceptional. Grant had anticipated difficulties with his second director, the video whiz, but the kid backed him to the hilt, finding cheaper and slicker ways to pull off the effects he proposed. For the first time since his release on parole, Grant was happy and it showed.

  His daughter, Jasmine, couldn’t believe the change that had come over him and their Sunday lunches became boisterous affairs. He let her bring girlfriends from school and sometimes he invited along the agency creatives. There was never a dull moment and never a second when Jasmine wasn’t proud of her dad. She told her aunt all about it and about the commercials that were going to make Grant famous again. She was so full of it, Fran could not be other than convinced. She picked up the phone and rang Linda to tell her what was happening and heard the relief in her sister’s voice. Grant was back, or at least on the verge, and everyone breathed easier.