Gunshot Road

by Adrian Hyland

  His head was full of questions. That was what his brother had said. They were the centre and the circumference of his world.

  Had he asked one too many?

  I’d been like a caged tiger ever since we got back from Green Swamp, rattling round the office, doing the filing, making tea. Reading Cockburn’s stupid little post-it notes. Maybe it was time I started asking a few questions myself.

  Doc’s brother seemed like a good place to start.

  A bird on the ground

  THE TRANSPORT AND WORKS depot was on the outskirts of town. The front entrance was neat and green. Urban, urbane, with a number one cut and a battery of sprinklers tossing out loops of water.

  The compound out back was a more honest manifestation of your whitefeller approach to the bush: huge and brutal, an armada of yellow earth-moving plant and equipment encased in barbed wire. The air was thick with diesel fumes and testosterone, the yard hummed with the hiss of pumps and guns, the rattle of running motors and men.

  When I asked for Wishy Ozolins, a jaunty receptionist directed me through to the Regional Manager’s office. There sat Ozolins himself, as out of place in an office as a camel at a cat show. He was an outdoors man if ever I saw one. That was where he’d been the first time I’d seen him: striding across the gravel with the sun on his face and his loved ones around him.

  His office window looked out onto the yard, and from the angle of his desk and the grimace on his face as he contemplated the pile of paperwork in front of him, I suspected Ozolins spent a lot of time looking at it as well.

  The cadaverous fellow standing alongside him had the rarefied air of someone who’d consecrated his life to the absolute mastery of something very, very small. He was peering down as Ozolins waded through a sea of numbers, nibbled pencil in hand.

  ‘You still haven’t updated and reconciled your accrual and usages over the last quarter,’ grumbled the cadaver.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The accruals! The usages!’ The fellow sniffed through nostrils that must have given him hell on windy mornings. ‘And you haven’t applied the tax entry depreciation percentage rates to the assets register.’

  ‘Was I supposed to?’

  ‘The Audit Act says you’re supposed to. I imagine the auditors will too.’

  Ozolins flinched and twisted in his seat.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘Mr Ozolins?’

  He raised his eyes. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he exclaimed, then leapt to his feet, came running at me. Ran right past and threw open the window. ‘Stop right there!’

  There must have been twenty men moving about the yard in a variety of occupations—loading trucks, flinging forty-fours, stripping equipment—but such was the level of command in the voice that every one of them—even the driver of a ten-tonne crane truck manoeuvring in the yard—stopped what he was doing.

  Maybe not every one of them.

  ‘Thornie!’ he growled.

  There was a bloke with a face like a dried waterhole in a lean-to near the office; the lean-to was rickety, its occupant ricketier. He appeared to be grappling with a post-modern sculpture—a thing of plastic slats, aluminium tubing and garish green bolts. He pushed on with his task, oblivious to the imposing voice from above; if anything, he seemed to speed up, although on closer inspection it was only the shakes that accelerated—he was still getting nowhere, but getting there faster.

  ‘Thornie!’

  The bloke in the lean-to raised his head reluctantly, flush-faced, like a man trying to hide from a hangover.

  ‘Wishy?’

  ‘Told you to put a safety rail around that nest.’

  I saw what Ozolins was referring to now. Out in the middle of the compound, on the ground in front of the truck: a plover’s nest, the bird itself gazing out with nonchalant eyes. Hell of a place to start a family.

  ‘Sorry, Wishy.’ Thornie waved a jittery hand at whatever he was working on. ‘It’s this chair…’

  ‘That’s a chair?’ He studied it. ‘What for? An amoeba?’

  ‘Mardi asked me to put it together…’

  Ozolins rolled his eyes.

  ‘…but it’s got me fucked.’

  Ozolins jumped out the window. He grabbed a sledgehammer, an armful of star-pickets and a roll of orange netting, marched out and threw a protective barrier around the bird. When he was finished, he flashed a minatory gaze about the yard, waved the truck on. Everybody got back to work.

  As he returned to the office he paused, looked down at Thornie and his bizarre construction. Most of the parts were still spread across a canvas tarp; those that were assembled didn’t make a lot of sense: a mass of vicious triangles and other odd shapes. More like something you’d torture somebody with than offer them a seat in.

  ‘Chair, you say?’

  ‘’s what she said.’

  Ozolins picked up an aluminium tube, studied it, grabbed another piece, lined it up with the first, nodded to himself. You could almost see things click inside his head. He pulled Thornie’s monstrosity apart and threw it together again with a speed so casual it was almost indecent.

  Definitely an outdoors man, I decided, somebody who could think on his feet, come up with practical solutions.

  When he finished, he stood with his hands on his hips, examined the chair.

  ‘Ergonomic,’ he explained to Thornie, and tried it out, cautiously at first, then with obvious pleasure. ‘Hmmm. Not bad.’ He put his hands behind his head and leaned back. ‘If you like your ankles up your arse and your goolies in the gravel. Bigger model’d do the trick. Warren!’

  The pallid fellow next to me stepped forward, poked a crabby nose out the window.

  ‘Can we afford another one of these?’

  ‘You don’t sign off on those estimates, we’ll have to hock the ones we’ve got.’

  Ozolins took a last, reluctant look around the yard, came back in through the window, dolefully contemplated the paper glacier flowing across his desk.

  He raised his head and seemed to realise, for the first time, that I was there.

  ‘Who’re you?’

  He had a deep, gravelly voice, rough around the edges, but strangely reassuring when it homed in on you. You knew where you stood with a voice like that.

  A woman lugging an armful of files and an arse like a wheelie bin poked her head into the room.

  ‘Front office buzzed her through,’ she snapped. ‘If you’d listen to your…’

  ‘Mardi! How do you get a chair like that out of stores?’

  ‘Occupational health and safety. If you had a back like mine…’

  Ozolins looked as though a dozen rejoinders were competing to be first out of his mouth, but he caught sight of the glaciating gaze and wisely restrained himself.

  ‘Phew!’ He turned back to me. ‘Worried you were one of the auditors. They’re due any tick.’

  ‘Maybe I am.’

  ‘Don’t think so.’

  I shook his hand. ‘Emily Tempest.’

  He seemed interested. Or at least relieved at the prospect of another distraction from the paperwork. He stared at the ceiling. ‘You’d be one of the Tempests from Moonlight Downs then?’

  ‘One of the two, yeah.’

  ‘I know your old man. Saved my bacon once, west of Moonlight.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I’m stuck in the mother of all bogs and ready to start hoofin it, when he appears out of nowhere and pulls me out. Him and an old blackfeller.’

  ‘Remember the old feller’s name?’

  ‘Strewth, it was years ago. Washington, maybe?’

  ‘Lincoln.’

  He snapped his fingers. ‘That’s it. Right job, wrong man.’

  ‘Surprised you didn’t say Obama.’

  ‘Clever bugger, whatever he was called. They’re looking for me, knew I was out there. But they couldn’t have seen my tracks: they were coming from the opposite direction. Asked the old feller how he knew I was in trouble and he just smiled.’

  ‘Ye
ah, that was Lincoln. Had that enigmatic smile down pat.’ A shadow passed over the conversation as I thought about the man I’d loved like a favourite uncle.

  ‘What can I do for you, Emily?’

  ‘Wanted to talk about your brother.’

  He slapped the desk. ‘Knew I’d seen you before! You were at the cemetery.’

  ‘Wasn’t all I was at.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I was at Green Swamp just after he died. With the cops. I’m an ACPO.’

  ‘That a skin disease?’

  ‘Aboriginal Community Police.’

  He glanced at my uniform.

  ‘The other half’s in the mail. What did they tell you about his death?’

  ‘Same as they told everybody else, I gather. They got old Wireless locked up…’

  ‘Stitched up, more like it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s probably unfair. Let’s just say there were a few…’

  ‘Excuse me, Mr Ozolins.’

  A teenage boy covered in sweat and a set of bedraggled overalls wandered into the room. Stood there chewing his lip and hopping from one foot to the other.

  ‘Spit it out, Jason.’

  ‘I’m loading the gear for the Kruger Bore crew, like you told me, but now the Cants Creek foreman reckons he’s top priority. Says he’s got a hot mix ready to pour. What am I supposed to do first?’

  Ozolins went across to the window, made a megaphone of his hands: ‘Oi! Bernie!’

  A beefy bloke manhandling forty-fours onto a Hino truck stopped in his tracks. Paused, twisted his head in our direction, smiled like a man not used to smiling.

  ‘Who’s doing the south road?’

  ‘Christy Wilson.’

  ‘Let him go first. And when you do the pour, try to get some of it on the road.’

  He grabbed a battered hat from the top of a filing cabinet, a bag from under the desk. ‘Place is a madhouse. Time I wasn’t here anyway.’

  ‘But Wishy!’ spluttered the bookkeeper. ‘The auditor’s due in this afternoon.’

  ‘Same feller as last time? Weedy little pissant, dyes his mustache?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘Fusses about his car?’

  ‘Can’t say I noticed.’

  ‘Well I did, and I just arranged it so he won’t be here until tomorrow.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Roadworks on the southern approach.’ A sardonic smile. ‘Fresh pour. Unfortunate, but nothin we can do about it. I’ll be in early—we’ll sort it out then.’ He turned back to me. ‘Now, Emily Tempest. I dunno what you’re on about, but I don’t like the sound of it. Can I invite you round my place for a feed?’

  ‘I’d be delighted.’

  Corrugation Road

  FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER I found myself following him into a large bush block at the southern end of Corrugation Road.

  Wishy’s house was one of the Bluebush originals. It was made out of blue-painted iron, a material that could be brutal in the heat, but this one was built with a clever eye to the weather. Shady location, wide verandas, apertures designed to catch the tiniest sliver of wind, numerous ponds and pools.

  ‘That the child care centre?’ I nodded at a giant ghost gum on the border of the property.

  A rough-hewn tree-house sat in the upper branches, with a flying fox and a slide that would have given a school safety inspector nightmares. There was an archery target bristling with arrows, a tyre swing on a lower branch.

  ‘Ya gotta watch em, but. They tend to put each other in the swing and use it as a target.’

  Loreena was on her knees in the garden, fork in hand, a profusion of bougainvillea, gardenia and desert rose blooming around her. She was wearing a hat that could have been picked from one of the bushes. She introduced herself, led us inside. She’d been warned I was on the way, had prepared nibblies and drinks.

  ‘Where’s the horde?’ Wishy asked warily.

  ‘Out on the rampage.’

  Wishy ushered me onto a sofa in his office, dropped a chilled brown bottle into my lap. We’d not got past first base when he paused, puzzled.

  ‘Something wrong?’ I asked.

  ‘Quiet round here.’

  ‘Thought that’s what we wanted.’

  ‘Not this quiet.’

  His gaze swept the room, came to rest on the floor beneath his feet. Narrowed. ‘Tiffany.’

  No response.

  He dropped an octave: ‘Tiffany!’

  The voice seemed to me to assume the tone of command I’d heard in the Works yard, but here it had no effect.

  He sighed, resigned himself to something. ‘Tiger Lily?’

  A voice piped up from behind the couch.

  ‘Yes, Daddy?’

  ‘Would you like to come and say hello to the lady?’

  A wiry little girl with a mop of golden hair squeezed out from the narrow gap between the couch and the wall.

  ‘Emily, meet Tiffany…’ She shot him a look that would have cut through reinforced concrete. ‘…who’s decided that from here on she’s going to be known as Tiger Lily.’

  The girl beamed. ‘I hit a six through the workshop window.’

  ‘I’m not surprised.’

  ‘Can you play cricket?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Bowl?’

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘Come outside and I’ll belt you through the window too.’

  ‘Maybe not just now. Me and your dad need to talk.’

  ‘After?’

  ‘No worries. Looks like I’m here for dinner.’

  Her father gave her a slap on the backside, shuffled her off in the direction of the door. ‘Go tell your mother she wants you. And Tiger…’ He thrust a long arm under the couch, emerged with the other half of the duo, wriggling and giggling. ‘Take the Time Bomb with you.’

  When the twins hesitated in the doorway, he rushed at them and clapped his hands. They stampeded from the room, but as we resumed our conversation I spotted a golden mop peeking over the window ledge and a tiny hand proffering a hopeful ball.

  ‘Half an hour!’ I whispered.

  ‘And an extra ten minutes every time you pester us,’ growled her father.

  He rested his elbows on his knees, pinched the bridge of his nose, concentrating. ‘So, Emily, what were you getting at back at the depot? About Albie.’

  ‘You know how he died?’

  ‘Some sort of drunken argument. Can’t say I was surprised, truth be told. Albie’d been disintegrating at a rate of knots in recent years.’

  ‘So everybody tells me…’

  ‘Is there some doubt?’

  ‘Probably not. But there are a few…anomalies.’

  ‘Anomalies!’ His face grew animated. ‘Albie was an anomaly from go to whoa! A wandering Latvian eccentric who thought time was going backwards and nardoo root was going to save the world from famine.’

  ‘Way the world’s warming he may be right. Nardoo grows well in the dry.’

  ‘He tried to tell me life evolved out of a snowball, for god’s sake.’

  ‘Well actually…’

  He leaned forward, frowned. ‘Yes?’

  ‘He’s not Robinson Crusoe there either.’

  ‘Oh come on…’

  ‘There is a geological theory that the Earth was covered in ice 600 million years ago, and the first complex life forms—which eventually became us—evolved out of the meltdown that followed. It’s called Snowball Earth.’

  He eyed me. ‘Any chance you’re as batty as he was?’

  ‘Possibly.’ I shrugged. ‘But I did do a couple of years of earth science at Melbourne Uni. Like to keep my hand in.’

  ‘Albie also reckoned he’d been hearing from our father. Reckoned he was still down the old Gunshot Mine, tapping messages in morse code, saying he’d be home for tea and could we heat up the stew? Anything about that at uni?’

  ‘Must have skipped that class.’

  He blinked. He’d just realised s
omething. ‘You haven’t seen the autopsy report, have you?’

  ‘Autopsy?’

  ‘But you’re a cop; I’d have thought that’d be the first thing you’d want to look at.’

  ‘I’m an ACPO—only the real cops get told things.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve met your boss. He didn’t strike me as the type to spread the love around.’ Wishy frowned; picked at the label of his stubbie. ‘Albie had a brain tumour.’

  I took a moment to absorb that.

  ‘Size of a golf ball. Must have been growing for months—years. Sure, he had a few inches of geo-pick in his throat, but he wouldn’t have lasted long anyway.’

  That explained a lot of things: the haywire behaviour, the delusions, the fights, the frustration.

  But not everything.

  Wishy read my mind. I detected, for the first time, a glint of steel behind that genial exterior. ‘Still not satisfied, are you?’

  ‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.’

  He let his gaze drift up to the ceiling. An overhead fan sliced air, turned it into waves.

  ‘What is it, then?’

  ‘Look Wishy, I’ve only been in this job for a few days, so I’m not exactly an expert, but I knew your brother—liked him. And I’ve got an idea of how things work round here, which is more than I can say for most of my colleagues.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I just thought they were a little slapdash, way they went about investigating his death. Almost as if they knew what they were going to find and couldn’t be fucked looking for anything else.’ I paused, caught his eye. ‘We owe Doc more than that.’

  ‘What do you think they missed?’

  Better to keep my cards close; for all I knew, the man I was talking to was the person who’d been up on the ridge. That didn’t seem likely, but I’d seen enough violent deaths to know the prime suspect usually came from somewhere in the family circle.

  ‘Hard to put a finger on it.’

  He wasn’t impressed. ‘You’re not just doing this for old Wireless, are you? I’ve got as much sympathy for him as the next bloke, but there comes a point when you gotta take responsibility. Can’t blame the grog forever. Besides, your sergeant—what was his name? Little Mister Efficient?’