Carpentaria

by Alexis Wright

  The helicopter blades droned on through his head as he lay semi-conscious on the floor of the moving aircraft. He breathed fire from the stench of aviation fuel. He fought against his inconsolable sadness. He wiped away confusion and nausea by imagining it had to have been someone else’s limp body he had imagined going through the door a hundred times. But every time, it was Hope who came back, coming back into the open door of the helicopter smiling, then falling out again, over and over. He could not remember the look on her face as she fell, but nothing could take away the fact that it was her.

  The very first time he had seen her, she was walking in the rain, and from where he was sitting on the ground, the first thing he noticed was how her bare feet slushed through the mud. Wet yellow grass blew on both sides and he had watched her from a distance, coming his way, with a dirty, sodden, royal blue doona wrapped around her. She looked like a big child amidst the smaller children who walked with her. He knew they had come from the Eastside camps to join the people he was sitting with next to the river. Everyone had been talking for hours about the mining company Gurfurritt. Will was listening, sizing up the mixed reactions to the mine.

  Sabotage playfully plagued his mind. He listened to someone saying people were dying while they were talking. ‘We are burying people and all we do is talk.’ It was true. Even this meeting had been adjourned for a funeral. Will had come hoping to recruit helpers with his fight for land rights. The fires were getting out of hand. Half of the plains were burning. He had to be careful whom he trusted. Allegiances were changing constantly and he knew the reason why. Over many months, he had watched Gurfurritt play the game of innocence with bumbling front men who broke and won the hearts and minds of more and more of his own relatives and members of their communities, both sides of Desperance. Will did not underestimate those innocent friendly meetings where the mining representatives claimed not to know what was required from Native title claims. He believed the company knew government legislation and procedures related to Indigenous rights like the back of its hand. His mildest to wildest dreams were swamped with top silks who provided piece by piece legal advice to the supposedly ignorant Joe Blow, the local mining negotiator, from as far away as New York.

  Some people were talking about the jobs they would be getting. You very, very wrong. They were arguing against the pro-land-rights brigade. Whoever heard of it around here before? Land rights kind of talk. Not going to happen here I tell you that right now. Huuump! Some were called Uptown niggers to their face. Others were saying they wanted the mining company to give the country back. Others were opposed to having any mines on their sacred country. Full stop. Some people said how they would kill anybody going against country. We can make it look like an accident. Get em when they been drinking. Manslaughter kind of fighting. They claimed murders of somebodies could be arranged to look like accidents. Yah! Yah talkin air. A nervous vein ran through the meeting whenever the strength of lawlessness was observed in their community.

  Talk was always cheap. Cost nothing. And talking like Che Guevara made the huffy people’s hair on the top of their heads stand straight up on end. A chill ran right down their backs. So! Without saying a word, because the meek do not speak, they went heave-ho, in favour of chucking out wildness. Everyone who was not talking animal madness like they were hearing, was quiet. Instead, they said, without saying a single word, if it was going to be like that – okay then. No one would bother speaking anymore. Then the moment was broken by the sound of young laughter floating through the air, from this little group from along the track, breaking through the smoke of smouldering fires.

  Will knew almost instinctively where the helicopter was descending, flying south, down towards a landing depot, at the mine. The helicopter pad was an isolated plateau where the wind rattled through large warehouses and hangars that had been built by the mine next to the petrol pumps. Light aircraft and survey helicopters were housed in these buildings. The complex was large enough for all repairs and maintenance to be undertaken by the mine’s well-supplied workrooms. The precinct was a self-contained entity, enclosed by cyclone fencing. Everyone on earth would agree that it had cost a bomb.

  The door to the helicopter opened before the engine had wound down, and Will was thrown out onto the ground. When he landed on his side and felt the dust flying up his nostrils, he rolled over face down into the earth. Through the spiralling red dust, two sets of feet ran out of the way of the moving waves of dust. Each man demonstrated a sharp alertness which meant, Will knew, if they were involved in this kind of activity for the mine, they were most likely in peak physical fitness. He estimated both were about the same age as himself. After the helicopter lifted, he was covered red by the falling dust.

  ‘Are you sure?’ The Fishman sought clarity. ‘Of course we seen it, we’re sure alright.’ This was the story of the two thieves, who saw the whole thing happen as they carried out surveillance activities around the hangars, checking on what they called ‘that bloody mining operation.’ Fishman’s men, who had returned empty-handed, waved aside further communications. ‘Wait a minute.’ Both were bent forward, with hands on the top of their knees, waiting to catch their breath. Not fit men, they had run, stumbling through fifteen kilometres of spinifex. Their legs were covered with bloody cuts. Incredulously they reported the whole darn incident to the Fishman.

  ‘Cut the tape on his legs,’ one of the mining men at the helicopter pad ordered the other after the dust had settled. Immediately, Will felt a knife rip between his legs. The two men reached down and dragged him to his feet. When he felt something hard pushed in his back, he had no doubt it was a gun. ‘Okay, black arsehole – get walkin.’ Fingernails cut roughly cut across his face as the tape was dragged off his eyes and left hanging in his hair. Will looked ahead. No need to capitulate to his captors, not yet. The ground picture was what he needed to know first: deal with the murderers later. He already knew they were dressed in the mine workers’ blue. Sight of the landscape confirmed what he had already guessed. He knew this country without sight, even when airborne. Once, when he was much younger and very crude in his methods, he had visited the hangar as silently as an owl one night. He had not believed how easy it was when he had poured industrial detergent into the fuel tanks, and because it was too easy, he created other havoc for the mine, then left unnoticed.

  ‘Get him inside – over the left hangar – first one,’ the man with long yellow hair, not the Italian, told the stiff red-haired one. He was obviously in charge. He lagged behind, dialling the mobile phone he had detached from his belt. In the grass, families of soft-rasping finches – white-spotted and blue, red, grey wrens, flew out of the grass, settled down ahead, then flew off again. They were quickly joined by hundreds of noisy, virginal white, feathered cockatoos with their plume of golden yellow standing straight up from their heads. Their wild screeching continued to gather momentum as they lifted straight towards the sun.

  This was kingfisher country. A lone, deep-sea blue kingfisher dashed across the sky in fright. Will watched its path across to the hills. Its flight was a part of the larger ancestral map which he read fluently. He does not have to speak to ask the spirits to keep the birds away from the mine. See! Mine waste everywhere. The grounds were covered in contaminated rubble. Make them go back to the river. Will had always been puzzled why the birds flocked to the mine.

  Whenever he saw so many birds around the mine, it raised a lot of questions for him. When would they realise the hazards of going there? How many evolutions would it take before the natural environment included mines in its inventory of fear? He and Old Joseph had sat in the hills and watched the water birds flock to the chemical-ridden tailings dams, where the water was highly concentrated with lead. Afterwards, when the birds flew back to the spring-fed river, where the water was so clear it was like looking through crystal, in amongst the water lilies and reeds, and natural waterfalls dropped between ancient towering palms and fig trees: they bred a mutation. The old prophet Joseph
predicted mutated birds would drop out of the sky. No one knew what would happen to the migratory flocks anymore. Will surveyed the distant barbed-wire-crowned cyclone fencing. An impenetrable wall three and a half metres high, surrounding the mine complex to at least six kilometres in diameter. And the birds danced over it while wild animals clawed their way underneath.

  ‘You, on the fucking chair,’ ordered the big-boned man with the fat face and yellow hair, the mobile phone still to his ear. Will sat on it and waited. He had time.

  ‘Hello? Yeah! We’re back. And we got the fucking mother load. We got him. Yeah! Thought you’d be pleased. Told you it was just a matter of time. We’ve got the bastard.’ The man with the yellow hair, eyes covered with expensive sunglasses, looked into Will’s face. He casually inhaled from a cigarette in his other hand.

  ‘What does he look like? What do you mean? Don’t they all look alike? I don’t know. Tall, skinny bugger. Got the kind of mug on him you won’t want to see down an alley way in the middle of the night. Remember the cop we had in charge of the crossing that time? ’98 or ’99? Yeah! Well! He was right. The mongrel looks like the rest of his so-called family…Yeah! It’s him alright…What? No, she panicked when we took off. Wasn’t any point bringing the bitch back was there? No! Oh! Too late anyway. Alright. We found her camping by herself. Yeah! On the island next to the store. Where we picked up that weirdo that time…Yeah! Elias Smith whatever. So, you were right. It was a good job we gone back and checked…Kid? Wasn’t any kid there. Probably didn’t make the journey in the dinghy with them in the first place...We found him sniffing around the store. Yeah! The Conte’s fine. Singing away to the birds when we last saw him…Alright! We’ll wait down here with the bastard.’

  Will watched yellow hair put his mobile phone back onto his belt. He walked over to the door, looked out for a few moments, then came back and saw Will was staring at him, straight into his eyes.

  ‘Hey! Shit-head. What are you staring at?’ The question was asked with a fist planted straight into his face. ‘You wanta have a go, do you? You wanta have a go? Well! Go on.’ The cigarette butt burned into Will’s lips.

  He remained motionless, only his eyes alive. Then he heard the footsteps coming closer from behind him, returning from the kitchenette at the far end of the hangar and with the footsteps came the wafting smells of hot coffee and fried steak. The fried-steak-smelling man with the red hair started winding plastic tape around Will and the chair. ‘Just in case you got some fucking funny ideas,’ the man snarled, with his stiff red hair standing out on tufted ends.

  ‘Come and eat,’ he said, handing the other man his coffee and heading back to the kitchen to deal with his cooking.

  ‘You can see the mongrel’s eyes. He can’t wait to get his hands on us,’ the yellow-haired one replied, drinking the coffee down in a single gulp. He wiped what remained in the cup across the air, in front of Will, and was not hurrying off for food. Whatever was misplaced in his mind was not hungry for food. He found it necessary to torment Will a bit more. He needed some kind of reaction to his achievements for the day. It was as though he could not find enough ways to fill the job description. Inches away from Will’s face, he taunted him with his responsibility for the deaths of Elias and Hope, screaming as though the whole world needed to know, not just Will Phantom. Will stared past the man’s ravings to observe the blue kingfisher. It surprised him that the bird he had minutes earlier seen flying away with its shrill whistling echoing behind it, had flown into the hangar and was sitting on a rafter, as though it had been sent back to keep him company. You don’t kill sea spirits pure of soul, Will instinctively knew in his own mind – like Hope, like Elias. They come amongst the living for a short time, perhaps little Bala was such a spirit too, because he was their child.

  The man’s voice disappeared. The sickness in his soul swelled inside his body until it burst, looking for company and faded away. His shadow joined in its owner’s personal triumph. Both took off their expensive sunglasses. Both mouths pulsating, describing a crusade of killing; describing how it would not be long now, they would be christening the new pipeline.

  ‘It will be a journey an a half you betya! Only fitting boy – after all of the expense the mine had to go to having to build a brand-new pipeline just because of people like you. I tell you what – you got the money to pay what it costs and we’ll let you go. No you haven’t? Nevermind, once we get you through the mill you’ll come out the other end, nothing but a big pile of slurry for the fish to eat. How do fish eat blackfellas like you? Slurp! Slurp!’ The yellow-haired man laughed at his own joke until his teeth bared like a wounded dog. Seemingly content, he put his sunglasses back on, and went to get his meal.

  Will had not heard the threats. He was thinking about the eyes of the murderer, and how he had looked into those eyes and seen his own reflected back at him. Perfectly matching eyes of despair – a mirror image of the murderer’s. The kingfisher was sitting in the rafters preening its turquoise feathers, and as Will watched it, it too returned a steady gaze until, as though hypnotised, it closed its eyes and fell asleep. Will remembered he had not eaten for two days as a sick hunger tugged in his stomach from the smell of meat cooking. Whispering a refrain to himself – Got to keep the wolves from the door, keeping free of the wolf pack, kill the wolves, keeping the wolves away – he soon lost interest in food. Searching around the building from where he sat, he began calculating distances and speed in his mind. How long it would take to reach the lagoon, laying out the track through spinifex, until finally, he too fell into an exhausted sleep.

  The radio in the kitchenette woke Will to the sound of familiar voices from the ABC, broadcasting across the airwaves, travelling through realms of ancestral spirits over great expanses, to reach into the loneliness of people throughout the Gulf of Carpentaria, the Channel country, and along the Diamantina. Stray rays of sun found their way into openings on the western wall of the hangar. The white beams of light crossed Will to spotlight the dirt and grease on the opposite wall. The radio broadcast only reached this far north about six o’clock in the afternoon. This was after the heat waves had fallen from the sky, and their enormous energies vaporised into a lightness, clinging to the ground. Will listened vaguely to the news bulletin and the weather report. He had to figure out what the two men were doing behind him, but there were no other sounds coming from the kitchenette.

  Could they have gone outside? He glanced towards the door. Perhaps their boss had already turned up from the mine, although he thought it was unlikely. He would have been woken up. Inconsiderate! Will cursed the bloke he remembered seeing on TV. After the pipeline was destroyed. Of course that mongrel would keep him waiting, want him to sweat, dreaming up how he was going to carry out his dream to finish off the little punk.

  Will had watched the bloated red face of someone called Graham Spilling staring from the television screen as though it expected to see someone wanting to destroy his mine jump back at him. Then after an outburst on how the mine was now threatened because the company would fail to meet the timetable of some overseas refinery already threatened with closure, which meant the loss of hundreds of Australian jobs, the face had paused, as if its voice had been crushed, as though a terrible idea had occurred to him, that his own job was on the line. Then, after a few moments, he just as remarkably found the strength to continue: ‘I swear, hundreds of jobs, and because we fully support the sunshine State of Queensland, and we want to help the people in this state get ahead and want to see good things happen here like this development, the biggest mine of its type in the world, I am offering a $10,000 reward, no questions asked, for any information leading to the capture of…’ He continued, his voice breaking, trying not to be personal about his tormenter, but Will recognised what he was trying to say. For the younger Will Phantom, from the era of destabilising the mine, the sight of the face twisted into mock hyperdrama was a memorable moment, but hardly the result he expected at the time from sabotaging the mine. It had
been the day of the terrible hitting back, hit and run, bang! bang! bang! Straight along the pipeline with gelignite.

  Will had always half expected that if he had been captured, the mining company bosses would queue up to have a look at the kind of person who would destroy a mine. The very same newsreader had called this kind of person the most feared of the North. But the red-faced Graham Spilling he had once seen on the television was not the kind of man who would be coming posthaste to the hangar in the light of day. The irony was, men like Spilling did not kill other men. Only the person, perhaps inebriated enough to turn into another kind of human being, like Frankenstein, could temporarily find courage to instruct the cold bloodedness of killing. Wasn’t it in the dead of night when good people go about their dark deeds?

  One becomes more confident when one’s not alone, and somehow, this was how Will felt. An odd sensation that made no sense, yet it would not leave him alone. There was no rationale in the stupidity of thinking others – what others? – would come to help him. Even though he had not heard any movement, he was convinced the Fishman and enough men were outside, waiting for his signal. Now he saw a different perspective on his arrival at the hangar when he was thrown from the helicopter. The Fishman’s two thieves were lying flat in the grass next to the shed when the helicopter had taken off. Through the dust he had seen them raise their heads from the grass. Hands signalled, questioning what had happened. Then when his eyes followed the flight of the kingfisher, now retracing its movement, taking notice of the whole panorama of spinifex to the foothills, he saw the subtle movement of other men from the convoy stationed in the distant hills on the other side of the fence. They were back-up for the thieves scouting the hangars for an overnight operation. Will knew if they were still around, then the rest of the convoy would be down at the lagoon. What was new? They were short of fuel.