Carpentaria

by Alexis Wright

  All the little country towns, dotted here and there on the back roads, hated the sight of Fishman’s convoy in the main street: dirty people and whatnot. The words about dirty people and whatnot, which travelled like wildfire, spread down the bush telegraph: Of seeing them hordes of blacks on the road again. The story did not go away like in the newspapers where yesterday’s story was old news. The what was likely to happen, a question of huge proportions and consequences, grew up into big talk, which must be big talk when town people were talking about killing the black hordes.

  So, there was no bringing out a Red Roses box of Australian chocolates to share around but instead, there were gawking people wherever there were shabby cars full of black men filing into a town. All we want to do, the residents chimed to each other behind locked doors in a mighty big hurry, is to guard the decency of clean-living people. They had a respectable place and there were Aboriginals travelling foot to mouth. Worse than even...? What? A bandwagon full of politicians. Why don’t you go out and blow up the roads when you see people like that coming here? Those tiny town shires spoke hard logic when sunshine was threatened.

  No, Mozzie’s life on the road was not easy and back home at Desperance, he was expected to return.

  As soon as a fair breeze blew in from the south, going straight through the Pricklebush and out over the coast to converge with the seasonal change of the Wet, there would be someone with an acute sense of smelling no one else had, who might say they could smell trouble coming up the road. How could that be? There was no reason. It might turn out to be true or it might be some people were born liars. Trust nobody was the motto.

  Pricklebush waited instead for the red wall. This happened when the breeze picked up and turned into a wall of red dust spanning from left to right across the southern horizon, visible up to twenty miles away from Desperance. Then they really knew Fishman was coming home. The red wind ran through their homes and the specks of dust gathered from Mozzie’s convoy hit people right in the eyes.

  Days like this stayed around like a rot, and every day the wind would start up again, as soon as the clock said eleven. The wind blew and blew until six p.m. and people with sandy blight in their eyes jumped with relief, as soon as the wind stopped. But still, no one would admit Mozzie was on his way, until one day, a red-ring-eyed person, some pea-brain person, for every creed and race has got them – an Eastside person – would start to make trouble. You ask yourself, What’s that noise? And it would sound like a stick being dragged along the ground. And it was a stick. The stupid person was dragging a stick around the ground, making little noughts and crosses, in a full lull of boredom on a sunny afternoon, perhaps, Sunday! When, without thinking about it, this person who you had been watching and just turned your back on what they were doing for a second, had gone and written the name Mozzie Fishman in the dirt and walked away, leaving the name in the ground behind them.

  It was too late to run over and rub away what was done. What’s that? Some old person who could read English came along and stopped, shocked. He stared down at the ground mind you, and could not believe his eyes. Mozzie Fishman’s name written in the dirt. Soon the old person would be screaming – Come out the stupid person who wrote that man’s name in the ground, who got to have a sound slap over the head, and then he would scrub the name out with his feet before walking on. But it was far, far too late by then. The deed was done.

  Ever since Mozzie set off down the south road on his first convoy, there had been many times when the Pricklebush people thought they had said their final farewell. We hopes he never comes back, the poor old skinny people said wholeheartedly as they waved goodbye. They were jack of him causing trouble with Uptown. He was like a dumped cat, always coming back, always claiming the people who had thrown him away.

  They said they only had themselves to blame for causing their own bad luck. Awful days passed waiting for the conjurer to evoke himself into Desperance. The build-up in people’s minds was as though some spell had been cast over their brains. Up and down the Pricklebush people went, chucking around their suspicions about each other and casting aspersions around hilly-pilly with their hostile staring about what other people might be thinking, and cutting up the air into thin little ribbons. Silly people tried to excuse themselves by saying, Oh! Jesus Christ I never meant to be bad. But it was too late, You idiot. The change was on the way and one day, materialising out of thin air, Mozzie Fishman would be amongst them again.

  ‘You forget your troubles easily,’ Norm Phantom was forever trying to defuse the obsession created by Mozzie’s visits. He often went fishing, sat in a becalmed sea, just to get away from the talk about whether Mozzie was doing this or was doing that. Calmer people often tried to persuade Mozzie to act normally when he was in Desperance – to stop his outlandish behaviour.

  ‘You want to stop running around town like a white man,’ Norm told Mozzie.

  ‘But brother, it seems to me you accuse any black man in town of being a coconut. I seduce Uptown. I get them to eat out of my hands.’

  Mozzie was a wizard or some kind of magic man with a cauldron of tricks brewing inside his body. Many, many Pricklebush people went up to Uptown and cautioned him, Be quiet about white people. He paid you no attention. You don’t go and tell white people anything. Not the police especially. But no, he went right ahead walking around town saying he was like nuclei. Did anyone knows what was nuclei? No. People in the Pricklebush talked about killing Mozzie.

  ‘Well!’ He explained in wild talk, his cigarette bobbing up and down in the corner of his mouth, saying how, ‘Everyone had to go through me. Everyone had to because they were like negatives on a roll of film and nobody could see their picture.’ He said when he joined the negatives up with the great spirits they would turn positive, instantly like a polaroid photo. The people of Uptown were convinced something was happening when they listened to Mozzie’s speeches, because they said they felt the heat of fire burning the side of their faces.

  Mozzie claimed he had the power to cause an enormous nuclear fusion which nobody on this earth had ever seen before, and goodness knows what will happen next. Whenever he spoke, using his grandiose words, he would lead people into agreeing how he could have been a great President or a Prime Minister in another life – if he had not been born in the Pricklebush. The policeman just stood there listening to Mozzie talk while his baby-blue eyes almost popped out of his head. Even with full uniform on and a cap on his head it was a waste of money paid for the power of authority. Nobody was in charge. When the policeman came down to the Pricklebush to see what Big Mozzie was up to, Mozzie told him the story about nuclei. He had the nerve to call out that story to the police, while knowing full well the law was being aided and abetted by all the governments in the whole country – state government, local government, government calling themselves Aboriginal Affairs, or whatever else coming from Canberra, because who knows by what Act of Law the white man calls himself in his many disguises. All the friends of the law were standing well behind Truthful while he was being set upon by Mozzie. They were hissing this and that advice, while being forced to breathe in Big Mozzie’s words like they were poisonous fumes of loose radicals: carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, carbon tetrachloride.

  All those poor Uptown people who did not know any better were really frightened of Mozzie. We know all about fallout, Mozzie Fishman, someone shouted at him, even though people in the Pricklebush who were watching knew the speaker did not know what he was talking about. They never knew where Mozzie Fishman had been, disappearing and reappearing into their lives. They thought he must have been living in a nuclear dump if he said he was nuclei. But apart from what was happening in Mozzie’s life, everybody knew one thing, people had a good right to be frightened about breathing nuclear air and Mozzie should not have brought his radioactive body into the Pricklebush.

  It was things like this which were the last straw. Uptown people started running around telling tales, until the whole town was jumping around
about Mozzie Fishman making bombs. Soon enough, everyone had an expectation rattling in their minds. With a major explosion in sight, old people had their eyes trained on Uptown with spyglasses from the Pricklebush. Look who was who ordering the law and order around. Reading lip talk, they said to interested spectators what people were saying Uptown. They said, Get him out of here, get him out, he’s a bloody troublemaker. Nobody could believe their ears, and said they did not think it was that bad, listening to the telephone wire twang in panic for hours between Desperance, and down South. The children, who were used to dangling themselves along the wire, said it was the line that was hot, that even the mad crows flew off in fright with smoking feet dangling below in midair. No one knew what the earth was being talked about that stopped the night owl from trying to go hoot! de! hoot! at two or three o’clock in the morning. It was such an uppity town sometimes.

  People united like never before to confront the Fishman with their shiny rifles aiming right at his fat belly button, which looked like a good target, but he told them to forget it. He stared at them with hard eyes. The look he had on his face had not been seen in the Pricklebush for many generations. He said if anyone got two foot in his way, he would explode like the bloated carcass of a bullock someone had run over, and when that happened he would be more or less obliged to spill his guts right into their faces.

  All he had to do was sneeze he said. ‘Yes, just sneeze.’ Such audacity. And the crowd, standing too long on Uptown’s hot bitumen road, hallucinated how they would all die one terrible death of suffocation in the rotten stench of Fishman’s exploded guts. Only the men on the convoy knew the harmless sound of his cough. A sound, similar to the faulty carburettors of their vehicles, came from deep inside his throat all day long. ‘Look out for unseasonable dust storms,’ he warned as the riflemen began retreating, heading instead to the rifle range out of town, ‘It will make everyone sneeze.’ Before they could move very far, he gave one sharp clap, and their twitchy fingers closed on triggers, with a volley of shots reverberating overhead.

  When everything calmed down, and he had their full attention again, Fishman said the sound he had just made was the sound of instantaneous death. ‘That was all they would hear,’ he explained with an honest-felt melancholy in his voice which made their eyes twitch faster. Perhaps Uptown already knew that the sound of death sounded like a sharp clap of the hand. ‘You will die one day,’ the policeman warned, wagging his finger at Mozzie. ‘You will know,’ Mozzie repeated, with a mocking sputter of spit, a little choking, and then silence. Only his cigarette continued to glow and burn on his Clint Eastwood face, whenever he inhaled its fumes into his lungs.

  The trouble was Mozzie Fishman was from a different dimension to other people who had to get on with their lives. Fishman should have known too: nobody should lose respect for people who had to get along with others for the peacefulness of the situation. But, that was too good for Mozzie, he decided he would stay in, or return to his own particular time warp, unable to get it out of his system. The art of compromise was too good for him – to get on with life. No, he lived solid to the past, to relive it all when he came home like a curse. Neither would it take him long to drive everyone else back into the past with him – two minutes of plethora to reorient Pricklebush lives into the past was the record so far. Two minutes back, and off he would go, harping on the piece of bitumen in Uptown about the time when the mining venture was first established twenty years ago on his grand-daddy’s traditional land. This was not the big, multinational mining company which came recently, but an old prospector he was talking about, digging gravel with a shovel.

  The very next thing which would happen, he would come marching around, like in one of them old street marches – a demonstration, and people who were just out shopping for the day, would look and say, What is this? Nobody knew what was happening, or what caused it, since he was acting like twenty years ago was only yesterday when there had been so much water under the bridge for everyone else. Kids grown up. Grandchildren on the lap. Mozzie was oblivious to all that. He continued marching along, left – right, left – right, stirring up the possum’s nest, bringing all those painful memories pouring back, if anyone could remember so far back in time.

  The old skinny Westside mob who went out with their spyglasses, peeping through the thorny bush hideouts and in unison tut-tutting, said: Boy! We wish he would just piss off. Insidious nightmare. Et cetera.

  Well! Nobody thought it was a joking matter because his talking caused talk everywhere, big talk, all over the country. Oh! Imagine how people felt when they turned on the radio and the television even, and there he was, speaking: talking on the radio about the mine. Even the television had his big face on it. Well! Big talk caused no sense but trouble which came along in full force. All the police flew into Desperance on an aeroplane for the day to pick up Mozzie Fishman, manhandled him forcefully to the edge of town, and chucked him out like he was nothing.

  If he was not enough nuisance there was more bad talk like nobody had ever witnessed, coming out of the fat lips of the Queen of Sheba herself. She, Angel Day, had eyes all over the place, even though she was still married to Norm Phantom then. A lot of people said they saw the wickedness of the devil’s face when she smiled although none had the courage to tell her to her face. Old Mona Lisa would have looked like a sour lemon beside Angel Day on the rare days she put a smile on her dial, laughing with her friends when some new man was in town. The old women yelled out to those hussies, Haven’t you got a kitchen to attend to instead of sitting around ponging like backstreet alley cats? Dressed all hoity-toity. Angel and her friends laughingly yelled back, Well! Old women you would know about what goes on in the backstreets. The old women knew what was being said as they waltzed around each other’s homes in the Pricklebush, whispering among themselves and listening to their rot.

  ‘He was like an opal,’ Angel purred through red-lipstick lips about Mozzie Fishman to her other moonstruck friends.

  ‘No! He’s not. He is like a really bright sapphire shining through the night.’

  ‘How come he be like a sapphire when the biggest diamond in the entire world was what he was like?’

  ‘He like topaz too because his very skin look like warm, delicious, golden trickle of topaz.’

  ‘Sister, that’s not at all what he’s like. He was for sure all of the precious stones, opal, sapphire, diamond, topaz, all rolled into one.’

  Perhaps it was the time of year when Mozzie returned to Desperance, which coincided with heavy doses of pheromones in the air with the Wet. They held open their hands to show a small innocuous looking insect. It was, they said, the secretions of this insect which caused younger women to become downright obsequious, although the unctuous charms of Mozzie Fishman were known across the continent, and perhaps he had an unhallowed relationship with all the insects of the earth. To those who could speak of moments in life shared intimately with another, if briefly (who could ask for more?), he shone. It was word of mouth which created this jewel of the imagination with its refracting beams of light so intoxicating for the female eye, swelling with unrequited emotional longing for the experience of the celebrated shared moment, more or less. Mozzie believed he tried no harder than other men to have women love him, but for some extraordinary reason, he was unable to deny that he was a beacon of light in the fog of men, flickering brighter than any other sojourner to Desperance, loitering in the Pricklebush of religious and political fanatics, evangelists, bigots, shamans, philistines, and passing-by self-appointed gurus.

  Angel’s philandering did not stop the petulant Norm Phantom and Big Mozzie from being the best of friends. All the confused mummies told their children that both Uncles were the brightest shining stars flown in from the night sky for the people of earth. Stories, stories, the truth became so blurred, except the owl with big eyes saw everything in the night: all sorts of people were visiting each other, whenever they got half the chance. But who was anybody to butt in and dispute a
nything a big woman wanted to tell her children? The world would be a very sad place, little children would be lost, if they could not believe in the fantasy of a mother’s story.

  Whereas Big Mozzie with the Clint Eastwood face was nothing but a bag of bones standing tall in an ancient pair of dusty R.M. Williams boots, Norm Phantom was physically and intellectually the bigger man. Their friendship grew out of Big Mozzie’s drive over those other competing religious freaks who turned up regularly to the Phantom household with their fugitive attempts to exorcise the demon, or the snake spirit, whatever it was, living beneath Angel’s house.

  The Phantom house took regular forays into other-worldly matters. There had been moments of magic, precise times of exorcism, countless days of solemn prayers and undying reverence. A Catholic priest, Father Danny, drove into the Gulf one year and in the back of his car he had one thousand little crucifixes which were erected all through the house, and around it outside, and he left them there for a month. The biggest discovery the priest made was that the Phantom family were the clumsiest people alive. They knocked the crosses over whenever they moved, and the priest observed that not one member of the family was able to walk in a straight line. ‘Tell him to get this stuff out of here,’ Norm told Angel who had insisted on these matters. She told the priest to take the obstacle course away, and blamed Norm when the exorcism never worked.