Young Kevin Phantom was not welcome at the snooker table as he swung in and out through the lads standing around playing the game. All the bigger and stronger boys in T-shirts and jeans took appearance and life seriously, while standing beside the snooker table. They said to Kevin, ‘This is a serious game.’ Kevin had had more than enough to drink simply by persuading people to pity him because he had no money. A few of the lads gave him their own half-drunk cans, and went and bought themselves a fresh one. He was given sips, as he worked his way around the room, just through speaking loudly into anyone’s ear, and pestering until someone gave him some. After a few hours, nobody wanted him around, and someone went over to the bar to ask Lloydie Smith, the barman, to get him out of the place.
‘Hey! Lloydie, come over here. I want to talk to you,’ the woman called out, but the barman had his back to her.
All eyes from around the plastic tables were looking towards the window where the woman kept calling, and waiting for Lloydie to hear her. The more she got into the rhythm, she made a game of calling out ‘Lloydie’, then standing aside to wink back to the tables, motioning with her lips ‘have a look’, and rubbing her backside with one hand. Everyone started looking. Their eyes, drawn through the window slot, peered across the bar to where Lloydie was standing, then the nudging began, eyes lighting up in merriment, ‘Oh! Look! He is doing it again.’
They saw Lloydie Smith wiping down the bar that was made from grey-brown planks salvaged locally from an ancient shipwreck. He worked with a wet cloth that was impregnated with spilt beer, and he worked on the wood carefully, in rhythmical motions, as though he were caressing a woman’s skin. Truthful watched his hands at work, fastidiously cleaning, smoothing, fussing as he always did. Already he felt in the mood to see Girlie. He left Bruiser, who noticed nothing, to do the talking.
‘Well! Lloyd, what about it then, that son of yours?’ Bruiser never cut corners with his bluntness.
‘I burnt my bridges there years ago and you know it, so it’s got nothing to do with me,’ Lloydie replied in his short tone of voice.
‘You want to come down and help us ask him what happened, you might be able to get it out of the little bugger?’
‘Nope! Nothing to do with me.’
‘We’ll ask his mother then, if we can get her to talk.’
Lloydie happened to know her brother, the goat man, had had it up to the eyeballs with Aaron, and had said he would kill the little bugger the next time he saw him. And she, if you looked in the cupboard with a torch, all you would see was a black woman with white skin, who spoke even less than the spirit of the beautiful fish woman, locked inside the timber planks of the bar. He felt her body responding to the soft touch of his hand. Moving her silvery body further towards him with every movement he made. When he looked at the wood he saw the outline of her body luxuriously posed and hungry for touching. It was fascinating to him that nobody else saw her moving her body around at him through the wood. He could hardly believe that she only had eyes for him, as though they were always alone. She was the she-fish, who had come alive from his erotic dreams, that had seemed so lifelike that he had now taken up the habit of sleeping on the top of the bar at night.
‘Go ahead,’ Lloydie said, more or less oblivious to Bruiser’s enticing. ‘Talk to the brother, maybe he can help you.’
By the time Lloydie had finished talking to Bruiser, and responded to the inebriated woman screaming out to him from the bar next door, Kevin Phantom had disappeared.
‘Where are you going?’ a male voice wafted out of the car window on the passenger side, as a vehicle slowed down next to Kevin walking along the footpath in the rain.
‘Yu wanta lift Kevin?’ the voice continued, but Kevin kept on walking, hardly aware of the car. He was thinking, wondering where his father had gone and when he was coming back.
‘He should’na left me,’ Kevin said, continuing to walk, as the car purred, moving slowly along beside him.
‘We would’na leave you, come on, and we’ll have some fun without him,’ the voice hummed in tune to the car’s motor turning over.
‘You got a party going then?’ Kevin asked, opening the door of the car and jumping in.
‘Yeah! You’re the party coon boy,’ the voice snapped, and the car roared off along the sealed road, did a wheelie down the end, roared back past the pub, turning there at high speed, tyres screeching. But it bothered no one. Truthful and Lloydie were outside the pub armed with batons, fighting some of the men who had been attacking each other with broken beer bottles in the mustard bar.
‘Clear the whole place out, I have had enough of the buggers,’ Lloydie ordered Truthful, as the car swung around the corner. It was action night, the whole place, except the main bar where the dozen men drank, was to be cleared. The car headed off along the bitumen stretch going south of town. All Kevin could see were the white hoods each of the people in the car had placed over their heads. Then he felt the hands of someone in the back seat pushing something over his head. He reached up and felt the rough thread of the material, like a sack, and he could smell wheat or flour, like poultry feed. He knew the smell, recognising it from when he had passed Uptown people’s backyard fowl coops. You could smell it from the street if you were passing by some houses.
Kevin knew he had to get out of the car, but he feared the consequences of jumping out, as it headed along the bitumen at high speed. Struggling, he twisted around in his seat until he felt the handle of the car door but realised it was locked. He reached for the lock but felt the knife gliding along his neck being pressed deeply into his flesh. There were several voices in the car, all talking to him at the same time. ‘Take this for Gordie,’ fists flew at him from the front and from the back. He started to panic, and in his panic, felt spasms running through him. Kevin had moved into another world, when suddenly the car stopped, and he was tipped out onto the ground.
Someone said, ‘Great.’ He had found the cricket bats in the boot. Kevin slipped in and out of believing it was not happening to him, hearing war cries, laughter, and smelling beer and rum. He tried to rip the sack off his head because he couldn’t breathe but the knife dug deeper, cutting him. Then the knife was released by the attacker who had been holding him from behind, breathing alcoholic fumes into his ear. When he started to struggle with the sack again, he felt the knife swung about as if it was being used to slash at his hands.
Whenever he regained consciousness, it was to feel the thud of being struck with something heavy. He heard his bones break with a pain that forced him to open his shock-sealed lips, and call out through the muffling bag to his father. This was when, through the white light of pain, he witnessed his childhood, always moving back into the arms of his father. A little boy safe with his father: telling his father to run, run faster, and he felt himself sinking into water. He was wet and hurt, and his arms, stretched out in front of him, they were being dragged off his body. His skin was burning, he was being skinned alive, pulled behind the car, its exhaust fumes choking his breath.
It was during the night sometime when Truthful was driving towards the Phantom place, and in the headlights, he saw Girlie sitting out there on the road. When he stopped, he saw in the light from the car, the body of Kevin lying on the road beside her.
‘We got to get him out of here now,’ he said quickly, but she did not move as she sat crying beside her brother, his head on her lap. She continued explaining to Kevin that she had no idea how to bring him back to life. ‘Where do I start Kevin?’ Truthful saw what had happened. She had only untied his hands and removed the sack from his head.
‘I don’t know what to do, it will be alright,’ she kept talking, rocking him and talking.
‘Where’s Janice and Patsy,’ Truthful asked, picking Kevin up.
‘Nobody’s here,’ Girlie said, barely able to speak coherently as she rambled on to her brother.
They drove Kevin straight up to the hospital. The sister in charge, with no one else to support her, led t
he way inside the fibro building. It was clear she reigned in this isolated outpost south of town. Within minutes, she had Kevin on a drip with an oxygen mask over his face, pumping air into faint lungs. Then she was on the phone in front of the computer records, ‘Is that you Doctor? This is the situation.’
Girlie stayed next to Kevin watching his bleeding chest moving rapidly as he breathed through the mask. She could hear the sister’s voice, repeating instructions from the main district hospital six hundred kilometres away, and heard her telling Truthful that the flying doctor was already in the sky, was being diverted to land at Desperance.
By the time the doctor landed on the bonfire-lit airstrip, Truthful and the sister had Kevin set for an emergency evacuation. Girlie watched helplessly as he was transferred onto a stretcher and taken into the plane, then rehooked to the oxygen cylinder and drip. The sister told her there was no room for her to go. Then the door was closed, and the plane was gone.
So, things went on as they do when the bad things happen, with everyone talking about it like they knew everything. So many private eyes. No one owned up to knowing anything in an official capacity. Didn’t see it. Truthful should have looked. He heard the car go past. The car sounded like a rally car when it ripped up and down the main road. They said, who was going to get up in the middle of the night to look at town louts trying to kill themselves? There were dozens of people involved in the brawl outside the pub, but they all said they were too out of it to notice what was going on really. I was too busy fighting man, but I should’ve seen that car and if I had then I would have killed the bastards. Some people were kind enough to say that.
Others said it was Kevin’s own fault because he was always looking for trouble. And Kevin, any moment he regained consciousness, his eyes looked as though he was looking at a white-fired hell. Sometimes word came back on the grapevine to the family about Kevin’s condition. An old tribal lady, a traditional doctor, went down to see the girls, and she said she had seen him. She said she went to the big hospital, all the time pretending to visit sick relatives from out of town.
They knew she had never left Desperance in her life, but they believed everything she told them. As a gifted ventriloquist she spoke with the voice of a spirit, a guardian angel, who had sat alongside of Kevin’s bed and waited. ‘He tries to scream the word “fire” but he is still running away, still unable to fight the souls of the people who did this to him.’ Girlie, Janice and Patsy existed just to get word from the old woman. They sat in the kitchen, or outside in front of the house waiting to see who would come next to tell them something, and waiting for their two big brothers to come home.
Inso and Donny had left their mine jobs and driven all night over the slippery road in the rain, to get down to the hospital to see Kevin. It was just heartbreaking to sit there and look at him. The brothers sat uncomfortably on either side of the bed in side chairs, in the white painted room. There was not much talking, except about going home, and to offer words of support, just to let Kevin know the big brothers were there. They talked normal, not mucking around talking, but strong talk, nothing’s changed kind of feeling, because they were the big brothers, to let Kevin know, and let him know when nobody else was in the white room checking every five minutes, he would be avenged, total, and sure, to the end.
They tried to avoid looking directly at him, staring instead at the starched white hospital linen, unnerved by the sight of all of the medical equipment which had become a part of him. The machines had dials scratching jagged lines on graph paper. Others had dials which shook while trying to stay in one position, while regulating tubes going in and out of Kevin’s body, wrapped from head to foot in bandages or plaster.
They found they could not communicate anything of how they felt after a few words, so they sat there in silence, pondering who did this to him. Then, Inso or Donny looked at each other and gave the nod to go, so they could talk, and they left. A few hours later, down at the pub, they would use the payphone to call Truthful and ask him, ‘What the bloody hell was going on up there?’ There was no way, they told Truthful, that they believed he was doing everything he could to catch the buggers, ‘Are you?’ Each took the phone in turn to accuse him of protecting the bastards who picked on Kevin. ‘Aren’t you? You moron.’
‘Give me a break,’ Truthful demanded, and told them to keep away because he was pretty close to catching the culprits and he did not want them frightened off and leaving town. ‘Ah! Yeah!’ Donny and Inso replied before hanging up on him, while Truthful was trying to remind them about their jobs at the mine. Truthful was moved to the top of their list of how they were going to deal with everything, once they got home.
‘They’ve still got him on the respirator,’ Truthful told Girlie, the first, second and third day. He kept coming down to the Phantom place expecting sympathy for the huge load on his plate. He still didn’t have a clue who had beaten up Kevin. He and Bruiser were already busy enough investigating Gordie’s death.
‘There can’t be that many hoon cars to look at,’ Girlie clipped in the icy voice she reserved for the world of the incompetent. She was sitting at the kitchen table, arms folded, staring straight into Truthful’s face. The other two sisters sat around the kitchen table as well, their big arms folded, waiting to hear what he had to say.
‘There is no need for the hostilities,’ he replied. ‘You already know I’ve asked everybody in this useless town.’
‘Oh! Yeah!’ Girlie glared, her arms and legs crossed tighter. ‘Well! I don’t think that is good enough. What do you think Janice? Do you think that is good enough? Hey! And what about you Patsy? Don’t you think someone should have been arrested by now? Someone taken in for questioning?’ And she looked straight back at Truthful. Her words were like fired bullets. ‘You were quick smart about finding a few little black boys to arrest for that stupid Gordie. The pimp. He deserved what he got. But what did our Kevin do? What harm did he do to anyone?’
Truthful was fuming, said he thought they were a mob of hypocrites, ‘I seen the way you looked after your brother.’ He dared not mention that two of the little black boys Girlie referred to were her stepbrothers. Not in this house if anyone had any sense.
‘Oh! Really. And how’s that?’ Girlie challenged.
‘Forget it,’ Truthful said, feeling the last thing he needed was to create an enemy out of Girlie right now. He tried to touch her on the arm but she moved away. ‘I don’t know what I am saying half the time. I have had hardly any sleep for days. I got to get some sleep soon or I am going to go mad thinking about what has happened to everybody.’
There was silence in the room. They knew that he was blaming his lack of sleep on Girlie for not letting him stay with her. They kept their mouths shut for a change, because they knew the truth of the matter was otherwise, it was Truthful himself who did not want to stay. Girlie had hissed at her sisters days ago, ‘Said he was too busy. Said he had to guard the prison until he could get some help. Said he had to keep an eye on those boys. Well! That suits me fine, the big ugly bastard, stinking of grog and who knows what. I bet he is molesting those little boys because nobody cares what happens to them.’
The two other sisters had heard rumours many times previously about Truthful, Shh! being bisexual. The boys at the pub talked about it around the pool table in a flippant kind of way. In terms of what they heard had happened to other boys after hours, being picked up on the road by Truthful, or what they thought would happen to them if they ended up locked up for the night. Neither Janice nor Patsy discussed any of these revelations with Girlie, since she was sleeping with him, and maybe she did not want to know, because, surely, she would know. A woman knows.
It was really peculiar how an ordinary house could evoke strange pictures in the loose minds of people. It was really just a simple house. A house built with the hopes of raising a family, Norm Phantom had always claimed, when he talked about his home.
Yet, there are houses, so removed, they have no call for the h
igh moral ground. Such houses are regarded as being so strange, like the Phantom house with its twisty corridor of corrugated iron, it bestowed significant powers in the minds of Uptown. They claimed it would conquer those it conjured into its grasp. Just as Angel’s house exuded lust, Norm Phantom’s evoked terrible fearings of loathing from the great minds, who, like the black cockatoos in flight overhead, only saw it from a distance. People who never came to visit. It made your heart jump. They complained it sent the cold shivers running up and down their spines, just from looking at that sinister fortress of corrugated iron flanked by closed thickets of prickly bush. But they looked from a long way off, at the other end of that long muddy road from town. Crows flew around it at night they claimed. The greatest of all Uptown desires was to have the house and all the prickly bush flattened by a grader. Once and for all.
Everybody watched that black sympathiser Truthful with a close eye, while asking, ‘I wonder what he’s up to now?’ Each morning they saw him drive out of town. Slip sliding like a bat out of hell, there he goes, in broad daylight mind you, driving down to the Phantom’s place, worrying for that young Phantom kid Kevin, even after what happened to Gordie.
‘He should stay away from that place.’ Yes! This was right, people talk. But it seemed the man did not have a thread of respect for himself, for he went straight to the home of the most hated and fearful man in the Gulf, Will Phantom – Wherever he was running amok again, who knows where – and did not care who was watching him. All without a care in the world, even though he knew Will Phantom had dragged the whole town down, when he tried to stop the mine from going ahead. That whole business had caused people to go stark raving mad. A lot of important people in the government said he had no right to do what he had done. Now, the whole world stared at infamous Desperance, and all because Will Phantom could not cop it sweet, his bad luck.
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