The Waterboys

by Peter Docker

  We take the right-hander and then the left.

  ‘Put the radar into the water,’ I tell Jack.

  ‘What?’ he says, not sure if he’s heard right.

  ‘Put your imaging radar into the water, and I’ll give you an education.’

  Jack nods tersely to the pilot. I’ve got his curiosity up now. He won’t be able to resist proving me wrong. We cut down, below the huge cliffs to our right. The troopers with us are gripping their machineguns tightly. Below us, the deep water is about to open up. I lean forward, straining against the seatbelts so I can see the radar screen between Jack and the pilot, and ... bang! There they are. Flashing on the screen in sharp green outline are the foreign objects in the water. Their shape is almost too perfect. The two warships sent by the British government to deal with the Swan River Rebels, side by side on the bottom of the river.

  Jack switches off our comms. He and the pilot are talking. The chopper wheels around for another pass. Maybe they don’t believe their own equipment. We come in real low and slow down right over the spot below the cliffs. It is deep. The deepest spot in the river. But there they are, sitting on the bottom as if sunk only yesterday, masts still on the ships and all.

  Jack and the pilot are still talking when the rocket is fired at us. Everything goes into slow motion. From up the cliff comes the fiery projectile and hits us right in the tail. We get a glance at the two Countrymen there, as there is an explosion and a big shudder behind us, and the chopper goes into a spin, sideways and down. The two troopers on the guns open up and the rounds spray the cliff and water in a crazy arc around the downward spiralling helicopter. The back end drops and smashes into the deep green, flipping us over and in we go, upside down. The guns fall silent as the water gets hold of us and sucks us down. The water is cool and clear. The temperature drops sharply as we descend and the pressure on our flesh increases. We’re still strapped in.

  Finally we are down in the dark green cold and the machine around us comes to a rest. Mularabone and I hit our release buttons. We push ourselves out and away from the chopper and start to swim. Above us, there is nothing but the serene green of the Darbal Yaragan. Below us, the shape of the helicopter is shrouded by swirling mud and silt. I get the feeling about a direction and, instead of kicking directly for the surface, I go in toward the submerged cliff face. Mularabone is right with me like my wingman, like he was waiting for me to do something like this. I hold onto the rockface, and start to inch upwards, and then ahead of us is the hole I knew I’d find. I kick into it, with Mularabone right behind me.

  It is a tunnel into the cliff that heads away, upwards at a slight angle. As we go upwards, we see the light at the top of the tunnel. We kick out for it, feeling the pressure subsiding in our ears, and in moments we break the surface.

  We’re in a grotto. There is a sandy beach, and a light-filled tunnel snaking away above us. We drag ourselves up onto the underground beach, heaving and wheezing.

  Down the tunnel come two Countrymen. They’re both carrying automatic weapons. They greet us like long lost relatives.

  ‘Eh! Eh! Welcome to Country, yutupella!’

  And all four of us are laughing. Mularabone and I pull ourselves up and look back into the water.

  ‘Ya reckon they got out, coorda?’

  I shrug. Jack and the pilot are both trained.

  Back in there, in the depths, there is a helicopter sitting upside down on the deck of those 1830s British warships. There is a certain poetry in that. Military history is the same as family history: if you don’t learn from your mistakes, you are destined to repeat them.

  Above us, we can hear the sound of other choppers, and heavy weapons firing.

  ‘Your mob gonna be all right?’ I ask.

  ‘It’s just us two, cuz. There’s no one else here. They’re firin at nuthin.’

  This is a big joke to the two local lads.

  ‘We’re just teasin em, anyway. We won’t start up big til yutupella are ready.’

  ‘When your slate is clean,’ adds the other lad, and looks right at me.

  It’s not surprising that these men know everything about us. This is what Uncle meant: the Country speaking up. We are all little lumps of clay moving around. We are the Country. What the earth our Mother knows – we all know.

  Dreaming 44: Value of Concrete

  I’m standing on bare concrete. It’s a ramp. Everywhere is concrete. Concrete ramp, concrete walls, and a big, thick concrete parapet shielding the emergency drop-off point from the busy road I can hear beyond. A car horn beeps, one of those loud and sudden air-horns, and I jump, that old flinch from my childhood creeping back in. When he would sneak up behind me and shout suddenly was curiously more terrifying than when I got hit. Getting hit is easy. You don’t have to think about getting hit. You don’t have to react, to feel the fear.

  I move to the side of the concrete ramp, where there is a narrow pavement barely wide enough to accommodate my body, so that I have to lean into the wall, press myself against it, to avoid being run down by the oncoming ambulance. As it slides past me I see that it isn’t an ambulance but a big black limousine. It screeches to a halt. The back door opens and a short stocky man in a dark suit gets out. He looks straight back at me, his dark eyes ablaze with some dark emotion. I steady myself with my chunky concrete hands against the concrete wall and return his gaze.

  The big black car roars off, disappearing down the ramp on the other side, and into the traffic. The concrete beneath my feet is humming with the vibrations from the unseen vehicular traffic. The man starts to walk towards me. It’s like someone took 44, and put him into a wool press, compressing his bulk down into this stocky, suited version of his old self, shorter but three times as wide: 44’s little brother. I glance back down the ramp. There is nowhere to run.

  ‘You lookin for something?’ he asks, as he gets closer, his hand straightening his double-breasted jacket.

  ‘Nuh,’ I offer, my voice barely a croak.

  ‘Where’s the child?’ he demands as he stops, six feet in front of me.

  ‘Where’s your brother?’ I shoot back.

  ‘My brother?’

  ‘44.’

  ‘He couldn’t make it. Where’s the child?’

  ‘What child?’

  In my eye he sees the ute driving on the road on the edge of the cliff.

  ‘Where’s the fucken kid?’ he asks again, and to emphasise his redneck accent, his hand dives inside his pure wool jacket and withdraws a .44 magnum gas auto desert eagle.

  ‘I’m not gonna arks ya again,’ he says, flicking off the safety catch.

  ‘The child is not for you,’ I say evenly.

  He fires the weapon and the big slugs slam into my chest. It’s like being cracked with a baseball bat.

  Once! Twice!

  I use the momentum to turn and run down the ramp. Two more bullets slam into my body as I run, propelling me faster down the concrete ramp. At the bottom of the ramp there is a small wooden door set into the concrete wall. I hit the door running, slamming into it, leaving a huge blood-and-gore smear, as I push down on the door handle and fall inside. I spring to my feet and snip the lock on the door behind me. Outside, I hear him trying to work the door handle, and swearing through his failure. I get up and start to walk.

  ‘Canapé, sir?’

  I look up to see a waiter in black tie and jacket offering me devils on horseback on a silver tray.

  ‘Give me ya jacket!’ I say, and rush him, divesting him of the garment before he can protest. I slip it on and it covers my sucking chest wounds nicely.

  I move into the crowd of people in dinner suits, drinking and eating. I’ve gotta find another exit. The canapés look pretty good. Through the crowd, on the other side of the reception room, I think I see Mularabone, standing by another door. I make my way over, with only a few big red drips on the carpet to betray my pathway. I get to the door. I think I hear women’s voices. On the door is the number 44. None of the Djenga
who are drinking notice me at all.

  But at the door, there is no one. As my blood drains away, my senses are playing tricks on me. I open the door and go through. I find myself in a car park, dark and quiet. About twenty feet away there is a man standing, leaning against a car, and smoking. I go straight up to him.

  ‘Eh, bro, got a smoke?’

  I hear a noise and look back to see Stunted 44 coming through the door.

  ‘Grab him!’ yells Stunted 44. ‘Grab the fucker!’

  He runs up to me and punches me in the heart.

  Agony shoots through my body. His fists are as hard as jarrah. I sink to my knees. I open my hands, and as he goes for the last big punch, I catch his fist in my hand. He tries to wrench his fist from my grasp but I easily hold him. He is a sad, strange, funny little man, just pretending to be a gangster. The smoking man who has remained nonchalant during the attack on me, reaches out and ashes his cigarette on Stunted 44’s head. I jerk him in close to me. I can smell the grog on his breath. It goes up my nose like a tiny willy-willy. That grog willy-willy is in my brain, and I clench my fists to hold firm against the chaotic grog wind.

  ‘You better watch your back, little brother,’ I say.

  ‘He’d never hurt me,’ his voice says, but his eyes are looking around for a place to hide.

  ‘I am the child,’ I say.

  I let him go. He slides down my body to the cement floor.

  ‘This is the last time,’ I tell him.

  ‘We’ll see,’ he says.

  A car in the car park switches on its headlights, blinding us.

  Thirty-eight: Just in Time

  Light streams into the tunnel from above Mularabone and me. We pick our way upwards towards this light. As we get to the entrance of the cave, the two Nyoongar lads ahead of us step into that light, and effectively disappear. My head throbs as though those rotor blades are still thumping away, only now deep inside my skull, holding up my body against the inevitable pull of gravity. My mind is wandering to those other times when I have wanted to wish away this inevitability. It’s like trying to wish away the desire to breathe. When I was a child, I thought that if I said it backwards, then I could defeat the force. From my knowledge programs, I already knew that gravity was made up of two forces, one going away from the centre of the largest mass, and one going towards the centre: so all I had to do was negate the force pulling us into the earth, which I easily did by saying gravity backwards to myself over and over–

  ‘Ytivarg! Ytivarg! Ytivarg!’

  And then I could float around inside the van for hours, or even days, until Mum came back.

  I notice that Mularabone is shivering so violently his teeth are clattering like a mob of old blokes tapping boomerangs together in a chaotic storm pattern. I look down to my own body, shaky and unsteady with each faltering step. The shock must be grabbing at us. Below our feet, the ground changes from hard limestone to soft sand, and the effect on both of us is immediate. The process of our bodies going into shock always intrigues me. This process is part of the survival mechanism of the organism that harbours our spirit. This shock mechanism can also kill the organism. To come out of this shock we need the support of others around us. At the level of the animal organism that we call human, we fundamentally need a community of other souls to facilitate our survival. Some believe that it shows our propensity to destroy ourselves – like the way that the iron molecules in our blood, given a choice, would choose to attach themselves to a carbon monoxide molecule, and not oxygen, therefore killing us. But I reckon that it just shows that we need each other at the most basic of levels.

  We start to sink. Sink down like we are going underwater again, or into some unknown quicksand, soft and dry and deep as deep. We are still making for the entrance with its waterfall of light cascading in, but with only a few steps to go, we know we can’t make it. My head begins to arc forward and down, as though it is simply far too heavy for my spindly body to hold it up. As my eyes come down, I see there is one very old man sitting just inside the entrance. He has a white paint-up, except around his eyes, almost like the spirit birdiya we saw at the airstrip. From his eyes, I see he is a dreamer. He has a pile of blankets next to him, and he is smoking a clay pipe.

  There is a soft ‘thunk’ beside me as Mularabone hits the sand. I am still watching my brother as the white sand claims me.

  We lie there like felled trees, and I hear Mularabone start to giggle. I catch it almost instantly, this hysterical mirth.

  ‘What are you laughing at?’ I finally get out, as I heave for breath in between my debilitating giggles.

  ‘I just ... didn’t ... know...’

  And the laugh claims him until it giggles him down to silence.

  I lie there too, until the laugh in me is all spent.

  The Dreamer is leaning over us, covering our bodies with blankets, smiling all the while. For the briefest of moments, our eyes touch each other. The warmth radiating from the Dreamer is palpable. It is like the love a parent has for their child: love that can only be realised in the moment of letting go.

  ‘Just in time,’ he says into my ear, in English.

  The two young fullas reappear with respirator gear in their hands. The Dreamer waves them off with a tiny shake of his head. They place the respirator gear next to us, and leave again through the curtain of light.

  I close my eyes.

  The Dreamer lies down so that his head is right in between Mularabone and me. I can hear him whispering an incantation.

  Dreaming 44: Finish Up

  44 is still half in the dark of the tunnel below me when he stops. He props on one foot and sits the Winchester .44-.40 into the crook of his hip. He almost looks comical, like he is playing at being himself and doing it in an unconvincing fashion.

  ‘Howdy, boy!’ he booms.

  I half expect him to start twirling his moustache; his playing of himself is so over-the-top.

  ‘44,’ I acknowledge with a nod and a smile.

  There is a silence. A silence filled by years of silences, as we take each other in. 44’s face is grim. He shifts on his feet. 44 looks like an old man in pain. Like there is no way that he can hold himself to get comfortable.

  ‘You wanna do it here, in front of your little friends?’ he asks and takes a few steps forward. He seems genuinely curious. I look down at the three sleeping bodies.

  ‘What? No fancy backgrounds?’ I shoot back.

  44 looks stunned.

  ‘No utes, no sand dunes, no cornfields...’

  44 looks at his feet.

  I make a study of the black baseball cap on his head. I always wondered what it says on the front. Just can’t make it out. It’s black embossing on black.

  ‘That concrete really took it out of you,’ I offer as some kind of conciliatory gesture.

  ‘I don’t really mind where we do it,’ he says.

  I turn and step into the waterfall of light. I close my eyes from the blinding whiteness, and stand stock-still. I feel 44 moving up the cave, across the sand, and step into the light.

  I open my eyes. I can see fine now. My eyes have adjusted. 44 is two metres in front of me, the lenses of his black-rimmed glasses glowing like headlights, as though the terrific light around us is also coming from his eyeballs.

  ‘I can’t see,’ he growls.

  There is no subterfuge. Just a sick old man complaining to his nurse.

  I make a hand signal, and the tremendous light is gone like smoke blown away. It is the half-dark of sunrise when it is getting light, but the sun hasn’t come up yet.

  ‘How’s that?’ I ask.

  ‘Better.’

  ‘We can’t have you not being able to see, can we?’

  He wants to play parent-abandoned-in-his-hour-of-need, but lacks the acting skills. The weapon comes off his hip and he cocks it in one easy motion, and brings it to his shoulder.

  I throw my hands up.

  ‘Oh, no! Not the face! Not the face!’

  I l
ook over my hands and 44 lowers his aim from my forehead to my heart.

  I smile.

  He fires.

  The click of the hammer hitting the empty chamber is as loud as a howitzer.

  44 looks down. He works the lever action to reload.

  Aims. Fires. Nothing.

  He throws the weapon down and his eyes meet mine.

  ‘Unloaded it while you slept,’ I offer, not wanting to kick the man while he’s down, but just trying to give him something that his heart can accept.

  44 reaches behind himself, and pulls out Stunted 44’s .44 magnum gas auto desert eagle. He fires the weapon, and it clicks empty. He tries to reload. Empty. He tosses the weapon. He looks up, as if seeing me for the first time.

  44 dives for his right-hand boot. Looking for the knife that isn’t there. His hand feels around, as though the knife might still be there.

  44 looks at me. I can see he is not beaten. He looks around wildly, and some unknown wind blows across us, standing on the sand outside the entrance to the cave.

  There is a pump-action shotgun leaning against the cave entrance.

  44 crosses to it and snatches the weapon up. He checks the chamber, and, satisfied, brings it immediately to his shoulder.

  I dig my toes into the sand and brace.

  Blam!

  The charge hits me in the centre of the chest and the momentum nearly knocks me off my feet. The ball-bearings spin me as they hit me, back to the left, and I glimpse the spray pattern explode out of my back. I look to the ground to see that my blood has fallen to highlight the sand painting that is there.

  44 is looking over the shotgun. I get the giggles. It builds quickly until that laugh has me, shaking me like a rag doll.

  ‘You always ... were ... a ... good ... shot...’ I get out, and laugh and laugh.

  44 throws the weapon to his shoulder and the charge smashes into my head, tearing half my face away. As I laugh, my laughing makes a gurgle as it comes out of the place where my nose and mouth used to be.