‘No, this or that is ever going to happen when Will Phantom was around. No way! Ever seen a brolga dancing in a mirage? Our Will, he moves lightly through the bush to the beat of the muddied and cracked dancing feet of a million ancestors.
‘Will Phantom was not full of bad luck, always whingeing and saying, Expect the worst, like other sort of people. Nump! Hmm! Like the ones who in ignorance can retrospectively call up the evil spirits, turn on the switch for melodramatics, make tranquillity run amok, then cut loose all those motley-skinned bush pigs with the spiky hair – to come out to play. You hear them tearing at your brains to get through to your nightmares – you hear them saying, Give me a three. Click, slow click, quick click, with their little trotters – up high, down low, too slow. Then woof! Out of the night dust, they manifest themselves into wild killer boars you never believe who come out of your head in their one, two, threes, and more than likely counting non-malevolent sheep to sleep, crazed, on their little black piggy-wiggly tracks for miles around, to make your hair stand on end when you walk around in the bush here with those kind of people who bring you bad luck. Those kind of people never made you feel safe at all. Never.
‘Or, just say what could happen in the broad daylight, worse than a circus, if you were walking down the street of a loony town – Soosh! Here, but don’t tell anybody I said that – walking with someone like that. If you were just plain dumb to go walking with those kind of people, you even minding your own black person’s business – Well! Can’t be done! You still had to keep a good eye out for the nearest tree or maybe, even a jolly fence to run to and then, you got to fly up the top.
‘There are some people in existence, just one or two, who make dogs want to froth at the mouth. Then what happens to poor old you, who just happens to be out walking with them sort of people and you didn’t know?
‘Well! You gotta know all the time, just in case those pack of another people’s biting dogs – real bad buggers, are going to jump out of nowhere and ambush you. And some diseased dog isn’t going to waste his limited time on earth being discriminate about you because you come from the city, because it’s going to bite you good and proper anyhow.
‘Then, what say? You could even be out fishing, sitting with your lonesome, singing a lonely song, except that nuisance flotilla of man of wars as far as the eye could see, kept following you around all day waiting for you to make one slip so they can leave your carcass floating and bloating in the sea. But Will Phantom was a different kettle of fish. Oh! Yes! He would come along whistling some happy old song he composed about the sea, and those jelly-welly creatures just turned around and happily be on their way. Not interested in making trouble. They left his fishing waters for good. And then, what happens next? Will Phantom left you, gone, shot through, never stick around one minute. Left you sitting out there in the middle of the ocean. Must be all your bad luck come running back just like clicking your fingers, just to show you, you got no luck at all and it would be – what next? Woom! Boom! You never heard so much noise.
‘You know what? More bad luck. Your boat’s catched on fire. There is probably going to be an explosion. And you are that jolly well scared you are going to die in the ocean, you just about run across water to get home.
‘See! Well none of that. That never happened to Norm Phantom and he passed all of that on to Will. So! Will has a good way with nature, all of the natural things, except he is not too good with human nature. That boy was in one hell of rush to throw fuel on man-made adversaries. If it had anything to do with mankind, he had the knack to rub it hard, right up the wrong way. His father was like that too. And if you thought the falling out with his father was not a good thing – you are wrong about that. It was a blessing compared to what he had gone around accomplishing in his life to date. Oh! Poor me – What a history. This lad was writing memory with a firestick that made lightning look dull.
‘So, if you want to know what Will Phantom looked like – He looked like that.’
When Will Phantom had caught his first glimpse of the fisherman on the lagoon from Mozzie’s vehicle sliding down the gravel track through the spearwood trees, he knew it was Elias even though the emaciated shell barely resembled the man he once knew who had helped tame his childhood spirit. He knew it, as true as only water people with a natural cunning have of recognising another fisherman by sight, from a huge distance away, even across heavy seas, from the particular way he sat, stooped over a line.
He felt a tinge of guilt about not telling Mozzie at the time, but for some strange reason he knew he had to stay quiet about poor old Elias while the convoy was at the lagoon. He felt he had to respect Elias’s death and privacy. It would have been how Elias would have wanted it. He remembered a private man who shunned opportunities for the company of other people. He saw Elias, a tall, shaggy white-haired man in his fish-smelling hut stacked inside and out with fishing gear, and watched his hard-skinned fingers longing for salt water, skilfully fixing lines, fashioning a spearwood rod, mending nets, his whole existence one of a fishingman’s life. Elias, with shy downcast eyes away from the sea, said he never had time for socialising and mixing with strangers.
All of these childhood memories flooded through Will Phantom’s mind, and he accepted the gift of Elias’s spirit, who had been waiting to pass these memories of his life onto him. The stranger to others, who had taken him fishing, growing him up in the sea. The last thing Elias would have wanted would be to have strangers pawing over his remains, staring at him close up, trying to read his soul with who knows what kind of thoughts they were likely to be carrying around in their heads. But as it turned out he realised he need not have worried himself about Elias’s wish for privacy in death. Although Elias might have been a dead man for weeks or months, he still had enough life in him to protect his personal privacy. The discovery of a body had set off pandemonium amongst the convoy, and within minutes, everyone had bundled themselves back into their jalopies, and were rip-roaring up the track in a stampede to get back on the main road.
A gentle northerly breeze had started to blow through the spearwood after the last of the convoy was heard – zem, zem, crackling up the track. The breeze had come down from the sea, passing inconspicuously over the noisy motor cars on the Gulf road, touching Will in a gentle caress, as though the ocean seemed pleased to know its son had returned.
Time was a fleeting whisper for Will sitting on the edge of the lagoon that had been carved by an eternity of rushing floodwaters inside the remains of a forest that lived a million years ago, and had, after a moment of shock when drowned by high seas, petrified into rock. Time accumulates thought or vice versa and Will Phantom, in no hurry to return home after years, since he had been travelling on sacred journeys, took his time deciding what he ought to do about pulling the boat in, until he felt a cold shiver of fear running down his back. Swiftly he glanced around, and in the silence nothing moved, except where a thudding of ancestral footsteps was pounding loudly in his head, and his fear shifted, across to Elias in the lagoon.
He began to think how strange it was for Elias to be sitting out there, peculiar how someone who had never left the sea’s edge could be so far inland from the coast. His best memory of Elias was the coastal man forever staring at the seas lost from his memory. Now Will, who had spent too long following the illusions of the Dreamtime, was thrown back into the real world, where men became clowns and clowns men, which was another string of illusions altogether. How could he have come so far, particularly if he had to carry his boat over long stretches of dry land? How far would he have reached before the sheer exhaustion of the effort of carrying the boat overland had overtaken him? Surely, he would have needed at least one or two other men to help him upriver?
Will began to chart the river course from the sea that might have been how Elias had brought his boat inland. Will knew this river backward, like the palm of his hand. The river and Will Phantom had many secrets to share. So, Will mapped the journey and stalled at the many gaps in
the river where Elias would have stalled too, to catch his breath and to contemplate the boat which would not have made it through the narrow causeways, prevented by the jagged, petrified remains of the ancient trees, perhaps once fig trees, that had become rock. There were places where the water was just a trickle, where only a green ant, on a floating piece of weed, would have been able to forge its way ahead. Elias would have been forced to carry the boat, not heavy, but a real burden over a long distance as he negotiated each step with the riverbank, climbing up on the side of the creeks, up along the wallaby tracks. Frequently, he would have been forced to stop, where he would have hesitated, and hoped he had taken the best of the long, slender tracks running beside the creeks.
Elias, manoeuvring the boat barefoot, would have wound his way through an obstacle course of dense prickle scrub, burrs, spinifex spikes, stomping bloodied feet through the long spear grass as he felt for the potholes, and twisting over and under a devil’s playground of hanging branches. It would be no good thinking about being somewhere else. Think if in one loose moment, and Will Phantom’s own heart slipped a beat for Elias, following the unknown river course, slipping down steep banks, where strangers could break their neck.
In the minds of local people there had always been an infallible certainty without evidence or proof of Elias’s knowledge which was said to have come from travelling the many seas of the world. It was just so, for the spirits who had stolen his memory had left him the sea. This was what happens with the magic moments – a skilful coil of a rope, a special knotted hook on the fishing line, slyly observed shrouded mysteries given a story by people who had yet to reap bounties from travelling distant seas. Yet, instinctively Will knew Elias was no river man, and in fact, could not remember one occasion of Elias ever going to the fresh waters to fish. On the other hand, Will knew this area well. He, having grown from a child with yellow spinifex hair, had walked through all these tracks, a billygoat’s kid, the Uncles proclaimed, and his father, the big man Norm Phantom, had joined in with the laughter, complaining with pride in his voice, the goat’s got no schoolwork on his mind – ever. In the happy days, following his father’s shadow all around this country, he already knew a little tin boat could not go through the steep-sided gorges on a wallaby track.
If anyone had the mind to be taking time thinking about somebody else’s life until his heart was content, or cannot leave a thing alone, someone like Will Phantom, then they would have to think what else Elias would have had to do to be sitting dead for a very long time, waiting for fish, with his line out in a stagnant pond laced with salt? The only straightforward answer to Will Phantom’s mind, was that after having been forced by the path of the creek to lug the boat up ridges of stone and petrified forests, on banks of flaking earth, Elias travelled across the high plains. Elias, single-handedly, would have carried the boat cross-country through the spinifex until the watercourse had widened and he would have taken the boat back down to the creek again. He would have had to repeat the exercise at least a dozen times in following the river from its mangrove-lined mouth to where he had ended his journey in the lagoon. And who was there to help Elias to go fishing miles inland, when everyone for miles around knew all the fish had gone to the sea?
Will considered the circumstances of the day Elias left Desperance forever. He remembered what the old people said about the terrible night of Uptown: accusing Elias of burning up the Queen’s picture. They often told the story of how offended Uptown had been about the Queen’s picture burning, and coming down quick smart asking the Pricklebush people, What kind of low-down dog, a complete useless loafer, would burn the Queen’s picture? The old people thought they were expected to say they done it, own up to it, but instead they responded to Uptown: Unfortunately, you can’t exterminate a Queen by burning her picture. That was the kind of treachery Elias was accused of when they said he had chucked four-gallon tins of kerosene all over the brand-new Shire Council offices and burnt them flat to the ground. Nobody touched the Queen. Uptown found Elias guilty of sedition and treachery to the throne because he was a new Australian whom the whole town had seen walking out of the sea, and when he went home to the sea again, no one had even bothered to go out to say goodbye. Nobody would have helped Elias to go inland. They had screamed like a landlord at him to leave their continent forever and never come back.
Will stood up. If anyone had seen him standing there, they would have believed it was Norm, fishing this lagoon years ago, at the onset of the Wet season as a million fish teemed up the river, when he was twenty-four. Will with bare chest, no shirt to his name, covered with weeks of accumulated desert dust, his jeans, no longer blue, were ingrained with dirt from months of travelling through the dry country. One muddy lagoon was not going to do a hell of a lot more damage, so Will Phantom walked knee-deep through the mud, breaking the crust of salt crystals which sparkled where hit by sunlight, as enchanting as snow.
Will knew that Elias could not have undertaken such a trip to the lagoon by himself. He listened to thunder in the storms brewing in the North, but the skies were clear, and the afternoon sun shone like silver on the mud, glittering salt and water. As he walked out, Will was disturbed by juxtaposing images, flashing across his mind. In one image, he saw white men, perhaps from the town, he did not know, making a mockery of Elias’s death. But there were only a handful of people outside of Mozzie’s convoy who knew about the existence of this sacred lagoon. Uncles! He needed to think of the Uncles but they failed to appear through Uptown! The suffocating net! He put the thought aside, knowing he would have to think about who knew how to find the lagoon – titles, names, faceless people jumped momentarily, a split second only to show themselves, to announce they existed.
He saw the occasional strike of lightning from the storms in the North, the day would soon become darker, everything would be covered in darkness, within thirty minutes, when the storm had set in. He moved through the muddy water which at its deepest level came up to his waist, and did not take long to reach the boat. He said a quiet hello to Elias, What are you doing here? He began to investigate the human remains smelling of the ocean’s salty brine. Interference, the slightest touch can open a Pandora’s box, and Will leaning on the side of the boat, found the aroma of the sea was as distant as the sea, compared to the overpowering stench of decomposing fish which emanated in a heat of steam from two sugar bags, lying on the floor of the boat.
Will recognised the bags the instant he saw them. He remembered how he had often stood back as a child, out of the way, wishing to become Elias, cramming things into any old sugar or flour bag – tackle, food, his belongings, rowing away to sea whenever he chose, coming back, jiggling a bag of fish in front of his nose. Will expected maybe Elias had bagged one or two old barramundi. The ancient ones that lurked in hidden places of diminished lagoons waiting for the Wet to arrive. Elias, a skilful fisherman, would have pried them out of their underwater cocoons. He believed only the old hunter Uncles could achieve such a haul. Any other hunter of the barramundi fish would need to be some champion fisherman to have found a fish left in this mud, let alone catch it. The other fish Will expected could be hooked, perhaps, a few reasonable-sized freshwater sooty grunter, rifle fish or bream, if the boat was in the main water arteries coming up to the coast from the spring-fed river systems. Not the useless little tributary jutting off into a mud hole at the end of the Dry.
He got rid of the flies that had picked up the whiff of rotting fish in the air. They were swarming in from every corner of the bush it appeared, for miles around. Hundreds of flies covered his body. The larger march flies, which also flew around the boat drunk with the stench, began to attack every part of his body exposed above the water. It was then, in those fleeting moments, as he caught sight of the rotting slime-covered remains of fish spilling out of the putrid bags, a cold shiver ran down his back, and he spun around, his brown eyes surveying the banks and into the bush, right around the lagoon. He looked at what was coming out of the bags. One fi
sh fell after the other, still with their flesh intact, and it was easy to discern that they could not have been caught more than ten days ago. Sea fish! These were fish no man had ever seen this far inland. Will turned to the spearwood as though expecting the spirits to answer, tell him what surely they knew.
Sea water was lapping its last little flip! slip! for sea creatures living where Will Phantom now stood 500 million years ago, when the sea levels had been as high as the surrounding hills, when time and life on the deep-sea plain of the Pacific Ocean was not even advanced enough to beget a fish. Yet now, on this uncelebrated occasion, Elias had apparently fished saltwater fish from the mud hole. Elias’s beautiful coral trout, pink ten days before, its putrid remains clearly recognisable falling from the bag.
Will could remember the deep trench in the ocean where Elias fished, with a line baited and dropped 200 metres deep. In the other bag, emptied perfunctorily, its contents a revelation of other sea fish, strangers to these parts of the country, were hardly given a second glance. Queenfish, snapper, red emperor, mangrove jack, bream, all reef fish, and one giant trevally, a tidal fish – so what? Will retrieved the line and pulled it in, discovering what he had expected, Elias rigged up for deep-sea trolling.
The white-breasted sea eagle’s flight was almost noiseless as it dropped out of the sky, falling down, descending down, so quick, until it flew, whistling in behind Will to scoop the stinking trevally up from the mud. Watching it perch on a dead log on the north side of the lagoon, it surprised Will that while he had noticed it hovering in the sky, he had not taken any interest in it. The large bird was yet another unfamiliar sight, almost ghostly looking as it sat motionless, claw on the fish, staring at Will, the boat and Elias’s body. The sea eagle was also an unusually long distance from the sea. Will believed it must have followed Elias.
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