Carpentaria

by Alexis Wright

  The hundreds of inbreds kept strutting about, free ranging, and with the moult, appeared half plucked, while bucketloads of summer downpours rained down on them. Hours went by: beautiful linear hours. The casual prickly bush observer, either East or Westside, knew, with the kids of Uptown, inbred fowl had no brain. The town camp people never ate those eggs. The grocery shop tried to flog cheap, dollar a dozen, dollar fifty for two, in the cartons of proper eggs which came from clean farms, ‘Down South’. Same thing, people started to get scared of anything else, foodwise, Uptowners produced to eat, like vegetables, fish cakes, sponge cakes on fête day. You could never be too careful of catching something. There was no point asking for problems.

  In this era of modern domesticity, where personal interest smothers the hope and joy of all of mankind, no one in Uptown ventured outside of their louvred homes where windows were tightly shut. So much caution about the colour of skin had been dragged from the past into the new millennium. They said it was to prevent all the goings-on in the street from moving inside their homes with the breeze. Outside, in the backyards, they watched, investigated and took note of fowlry shuffling around in mud-bearing ulcerated chests, and flashing red raw bums of the summer moult.

  Day in, day out, nothing seemed to be happening for the boys accused of killing Gordie. They were left there, locked up in the town’s little jail, known as Truthful’s planetarium, neglected amongst the crowded foliage of the jarrbikala’s strappy and viney tropical indoor oasis, feeling like they were starting to rot. Nobody gave a continental that those boys were standing in the same clothes they had been arrested in. Clothes turning mouldy in the damp cell. If they had looked all sweaty-skinned from the humidity building up in the bullyman’s jail, nobody noticed. That they waited sine die for justice was nobody’s concern.

  ‘You are going to get your just deserts for this. You are all going to pay for this, just you wait and see,’ the boys were told enough by Truthful, who, not accounting for the initial brief sideshow, when everyone in town wanted to have a look at the accused killers the day they were arrested, had increasingly become their only human contact. It often seemed to the boys, as the hours passed by, that the waiting for justice seemed to be becoming the punishment itself. They watched Truthful cleaning up around the jail building and they could see, and he wanted them to see, that he was really proud to be an active, crime-stopping policeman again.

  It was obvious to the boys, watching his every move, that their jailer drove down to the pub himself to get their meals. It was not easy for E’Strange. The hotel cook, his single aide-de-camp, shook her fat permed head of stiff mauve-tinted hair in disgust, when she handed over three disposable plates of meals wrapped with alfoil. ‘Lovie, you are wasting you time,’ she warned him, as though the food was too good for those boys. The clientele watched the methodical Truthful going past by the glass windows of the public bar carrying the meals at the taxpayer’s expense, and grumbled into the bar that it was a bloody waste of taxpayers’ money and why don’t they shoot the little buggers?

  The three boys, Tristrum aged ten, and his brother Luke Fishman aged twelve, and Aaron Ho Kum aged eleven, all Bob Marley look-alikes, had asked no questions, did not expect any favours, and asked for no one. Together, when they had been left alone, when sure no one was listening, they huddled in a corner spinning out in a whirl of raw-felt fear, clawing into each other, believing they were not humans. Often, they spoke about how they thought they were being kept like lizards in a zoo. Sometimes, they would hazard a guess by trying to make heads or tails out of why they were there in the first place, waiting for their ‘just deserves’. Spinning on their addiction and sudden withdrawal, they interpreted ‘just deserves’, as the impending time when Truthful would molest them.

  The terrible murder of Gordie during the night of the first seasonal storm left a sour taste over little Götterdämmerung, the twilight of the Gods, some called the ceremony of thunder, on the eve of heralding all the nights of stormy weather. This particular night was the same night, coincidently, that Norm Phantom had cast off into the gloominess of the open sea under the pretext of going off fishing, and never came back. It was surely strange, given that the whole town regarded Norm with suspicion, accusing him of many unsolved crimes in the past, that no one laid a finger of blame on him for Gordie’s death. The other murders Norm had been accused of were not like Gordie’s murder at all. Those, they agreed, were only black murders. This was different and required the very best one could expect of civil action from the Australian law.

  So, this was what happened. Quietly, the town celebrated Norm, the fisherman’s fisherman’s return to the sea. Years ago, before he stopped fishing, Norm’s relationship with the sea had been a beacon of light to others. His understated prowess in maritime adventures had led all nature of mature men to believe that they lived in the good company of a sea wizard in God’s own country, and once again, simply from living in close proximity to Norm’s prickly bush camp, his good luck would naturally flow onto all the others who went fishing too. The pressure imposed from the weight of seamen’s graves lifted. All negative thoughts disappeared. There was no longer an ocean full of bad omens and impending deaths. Norm made it safe for others. Everyone could go to sea now, even if only in fishy dreams of trevally-loaded seas. What other explanation could there be, for the heavy cloak of suspicion reserved for Norm Phantom to have been lifted so swiftly, and without a shadow of doubt? The nights that followed were full with a thousand elaborate dreams of seas so choking with fish, it was easier to walk over them, than take a boat.

  All the brave hearts talked fish at the Fisherman’s Hotel. In calm conversation building in gentle waves, they said, ‘And why should he come back?’ It was a time for wishing and great solace was found in it. They wished that they too had no reason to come back. Everyone wished to escape paradise from time to time. Wished to slide away in the middle of the night out to the storms, throwing their fate to the sea.

  So this was how it was. Ineluctable, magical moments of light-headedness flowed through town during the humidity. Somebody had been murdered, some boys had been arrested, and somebody had left town. Normal! Although many often complained about ‘the dead town with no life to it at all,’ and frequently lamented how they wanted to leave one day, it was pretty difficult to unbuckle the notions of permanence. The constricting binds strapped into their lives, strangling them with the fear of possibility. Nobody found it easy to leave their life: home, friends, parents, grandchildren. A known place to be buried in when they died.

  There were not many who were prepared to take a gamble with leaving a place like Desperance. Yet, the town boasted an above average representation of professional gamblers. The leader by a long shot, was the mayor, Bruiser, regarded by some as possibly being an alien, because he knew how to brush with good luck. He sat about inside his modern lounge room with a couch bigger than anyone else had to sit on, on those stormy nights. With brown Nugget and brush, people spoke about seeing Bruiser polishing up his old bookie’s leather money bag, in readiness for the dry winter race day, to set up his bookie box outside of the pub. But Bruiser daydreamed about money traffic, where anyone passing could wager for or against Norm Phantom ever making it back to the melancholy seashores of Desperance.

  When Bruiser brought the leather bag into the Fisherman’s Hotel hoping to catch what he called the ‘night swill’, word got around Desperance. All praise to the sea. Is he our man of absolute sea fidelity? Fifty to one, he’s not. Very quickly, wishing became excitement and entertainment. The gambling fever overtook the town’s shock at the murder of Gordie. The pub became so congested with gamblers and arguments about seamanship, that Truthful was called in to see what he could do. The owl-faced barman, who was implicated in the murder case by being the father of one of the boys in jail, although he had never owned up to his paternity, helped Truthful to build a queue of those inside the small crowded bar, jockeying for space.

  Yesterday, all of the
town was up in arms about the killing. Their usually complacent faces had turned aghast, knowing something so terrible could grab your heart and violently shake you into the quick pulse of the world. It was a pulse that demanded pay-back from your knowledge of having a little bit of secure life. It asks you to deal personally with a world where children kill. Initially, so shocked were these shattered townsfolk, they cried out to each other, What has the world come to? It was a difficult thing to deal with, this deception in their little world of Desperance. Their lives were solid, built on generations which had through the decades guarded their net of privacy and minded their own business.

  Parents in this world believed in its unique position to the rest of the world. Lives could be lived in the pristine vastness of the quiet mud plains, silent saltpans and still spinifex plains, where children grew up with a sense of nature and the knowledge of how lonely the planet could be. Children in this world belonged to the thinking of fairytales which came out of books, or else, the happy life of children’s television. Theirs was the quiet world where murder was not a child’s toy.

  Initially, when people of Uptown heard of Gordie’s murder, they had remained in their houses, examining their souls, never expecting to be confronted by a hideous crime committed by children. This was the sort of thing that only happened elsewhere in the mean, bad world, where the crazy people lived. They knew this because they had seen the lot on television and felt lucky, it was not Australia. Never in their wildest imagination had they expected to see the likes of downtown Desperance splashed across television, like New York, Jerusalem or Kosovo.

  So, unlike the rest of the world, it was decided by the Town Council that nobody was ever to see the crying face of Desperance on television. It made a humble request to the citizens to keep their mouths shut: ‘We don’t want anyone thinking we are not decent people.’ The silent word spread the usual way by the invisible net’s strictly confidential notification system, through word of mouth. The town’s ranks closed. Even a fly found it difficult to penetrate such a closure to lay its maggoty eggs. This was truly the only place on earth where decent, lip-sealed people lived. No one would see Desperance laying its soul bare. No one would see perplexed faces stretched like fawn-coloured lino across the nation’s screens. No one would see Desperance as Desperance saw the world – static broken and lacy lines for the seven o’clock news punctured with electrical storms, until a complete blackout was achieved. This was fondly known as nature’s censorship. No one would go publicly to the world at large asking, ‘How could this happen here?’

  So, poor old Gordie. The whole town cried as they rallied together one way or other to help the victim’s family. There was praying to do. The burying. They would take their part on the jury to see justice was done when the case finally came to the district court. Everybody thought mightily of their poor old Gordie. ‘He never hurt a fly,’ they said.

  Initially, on that eventual morning, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the month of November, when Gordie did not play the remembrance bugle, everyone thought: Alright! Something is astray. Something smells mightily funny to me. Although, at first, everyone had thought very little about it. Perhaps Gordie was sick with the summer flu. Nothing to be done about that. Life went on as usual. Desperance was a normal town where even the bugle player had as much right as anyone else to get sick with influenza and stay home in bed. Normal people knew how to tell the time without depending on a clock, or a signal, and had enough decency, unlike the rest of the country, to stand for one minute’s silence in respect of the fallen on the eleventh hour, even without the bugle of the returned, to remind them. However, valiant attempts at normality could not replace the bad smell in the air. The people of Uptown, without realising it, started waiting for the bugle. A wave of uneasiness flowed through the town. They felt as though someone was playing around with their sense of security. Everyone started to look out for Gordie. When will he come? they complained. He should have been by by now. Fair weather or naught, everyone knew Gordie walked the town, even if he had influenza, doing his job to the hour, but naught had happened and this was not good. The day was ruined because of Gordie.

  Ruined more than they thought. After the rain stopped, some poor unsuspecting anyone was whimsically walking along, with thoughts only of ploughing through the mud with a useless pair of thongs on their feet, on that same path now through the bush, and minding their own business, when Gordie was found. The body was steaming like hot bread with the two o’clock sun pouring down. Well! After that, it was Lordy! Lordy! There was nothing abstract about hell breaking loose in Desperance. The town bell would not stop ringing under the flagpole where the bugler used to play the remembrance tune. Every single citizen, first-class, second-class, third-class and any other riffraff after that, had been summoned onto the Council lawns. All ears rung with the talk, talk, talk which followed on for what seemed like hours. The powerful voices of the Town Council were overwhelmed with emotion when they said to the assembled populace, that it was a miracle any of his physical remains were found at all.

  The Christian connection on the Council said Gordie must have had a guardian angel, because nobody would have found him at all if he had not been covered with blowflies. There must have been millions of the buggers, they said of the wet body. They were as thick as a black cloud. They said, those people who were at the site, that if you had moved within a certain closeness, Gordie looked like some kind of disjointed black buzzing devil letting off hot steam.

  You could even see various parts of him jumping up here and there, and the rest of him – Well! Let’s say, thank God his Mother was in an institution. And two, the Council ought to start doing something about all of those camp dogs. Anybody should be allowed to shoot the bloody lot of them on first sight whenever they go up and down Main Street. Bloody nuisance they are.

  The whole town began participating in an uproar about wandering dogs and petrol-sniffing kids. Find out where they come from and get the damn lazy government in Canberra to ship the whole lot back there. Send them all to Canberra.

  No, the body was not a pretty sight, and the ugly head of all of those wild pig stories resurfaced about the ghost of Abilene. Terrible memories were opened up again. The grisly bush deaths in the past two or three decades, which could be counted on one hand, very quickly became exaggerated into something else. This sort of thing happens all the time, chimed some of the more disturbed townsfolk. It was the kind of talk that got everyone revved up and excitable. Volatile language was used.

  There were others who had to bring the cemetery into the equation, by making one sour point after another about who was buried there. Anybody. Anything. Sometimes not even a body was even put into a grave. There should be rules about burying things over at the cemetery.

  ‘You want to know the truth about the cemetery?’ A loud foghorn of a voice piped up. ‘It is chock-a-block full of graves with bags full of the bits and pieces of incomplete bodies.’ Everyone knew who was talking because the foghorn man had insisted his son be buried there after he disappeared. Everyone knew he had just run away from Desperance: driven off in his Falcon after half-a-dozen send-off parties. Some day he would return, and find he had already been buried by his father.

  The old people from the Pricklebush who had been picked up by Truthful, and forced to attend this meeting, were not very happy at all with this talk about the cemetery. They spat on the ground at each piece of tripe, while Uptown moved sideways in perpetual motion. It was they who saw all the dead people walking off into the afterlife. What Uptown liked to call tritaroon, quadroon, octaroon, full blood, or if speaking about themselves, friends and neighbours. Or, else, those broken parts, looking like a far cry from God’s image of a quintessential man. Imagine that. A bizarre soul hovering forever over the district, searching with the eye of an eagle into the guts of an albatross for the rest of their parts. They knew throwing stones dipped in holy water never worked miracles. Or, leaving the gizzards of a cow on the spot
of the fallen. Or, throwing into the ocean, a pot of stale urine taken on the night of a full moon six months previously by a sober person from an intoxicated person. Nor any other chic, New-Age spells that people tried, to cast away the evil from invading their homes. If you were dead and still hanging around searching for parts of your body, your soul might choose a better home than the miserable one you had before.

  Such was the wisdom of the elders. They said it was to be expected that people who believed only those who helped themselves got along in life, would resort to magic even in this day and age, although they never expected the Uptown mob would own up and say they were involved in it. These were serious-minded people who had escaped wars and famine from all over the world. This was why the elders were quiet at the meeting about Gordie. Anything could happen. Who knows, they whispered, what ideas Uptown would put into their heads from losing their Gordie. ‘Remember! Who bloody knows what kind of traditions people have, who say they came from nowhere and don’t believe in their own God anymore.’

  Sometimes people like Norm Phantom called the community disarray of Uptown the net of irrelevance. It did not take much for ordinary Pricklebush residents, family people, to see what the elders were able to see all along. Deaths like Gordie’s gave the townsfolk the heebie-jeebies. They became hooked into a subconscious mind which was used to seeing things, particularly in those typical red-tinged cloud-covered skies of the Gulf, the narwhal-coloured disembowelled spectre of the supernatural. Half the town claimed, on the gospel truth, they owned extraordinary gifts of perception enabling them to see ghosts, as though it was like the purchase of a new car.