Carpentaria

by Alexis Wright

  ‘And he was accompanied by the sound of the devil’s orchestra playing the horrible, sizzling music of hell by thumping their own heads together – Bang! Bash! Bang! We never heard anything like it. The sound was so terrible, we knew it could only be the sound of damnation. The only thing must have happened, the explosion lifted them up first, threw them to kingdom come, and when they fell, the devil took one quick look and said, “Curry them in hell, the buggers”. Or, it could have been, they got buried themselves.’

  The tellers of tall stories were given a cursory glance by Mozzie as he continued fidgeting with his hands, twiddling his thumbs in circles, as though the action would conjure the simple truth out of a gammon story. But in the scheme of things, it did not really matter who was telling the truth. Hey! Yo! Why tempt fate? No one here was going back anyway. Wishes were the only thing left. A simple wish was all anyone could ask: that wherever they fell, nobody would find the bodies until they were well and truly gone. Whispering again. Such a truthful mind running nilly-pilly, and so little control over his speech.

  Mozzie turned his gaze back through the rustling tree spirits to a spot where it seemed they were beckoning him to look, and he saw another truth in the blackened landscape. It was a truth he had seen earlier, as he looked towards the mine, at what had become of normality, as a spectator of this thing they called hell, and seen the devastation over the hills. Now he saw the real immensity of what had happened in front of him, as if the only purpose of such a miracle was to brand him, small and inferior. Blown bits of rose-coloured human flesh, amidst burnt black cinders, had fallen onto the ground. At that moment, seeing what he had, he wished it undone, but the terrible truth did not yield to the wish of a simple man.

  A fortune-teller’s time sped fast over the same ground where dingos, prowling in the middle of the night after he and his men had gone, were taking whatever remained of those people, scattered over the plains, before running and snivelling back to their rocky lairs inside the hills of the great spirit. A tragedy kept unfolding, and he, unable to acknowledge his culpability, wished to hide in the smallness of men. He chose. He would not see the extremity of his weakness, nor claim it straightaway: he referred time elsewhere. The Fishman felt a dull pain again, pulling his heart apart. The indecision was breaking him in two. Now, he was uncertain if he should believe in his safe vision of what had really happened. Did he need to know the truth? But the truth was, there would be no going back.

  Then, while the dark clouds of the Gulf crawled by, darkening the already hazy atmosphere, and cloud bellies touched the tops of the again windy bush, the attention was drawn of a young turk with the very best eyes, and respect for all religionalities among them, who yelled out in a rasping voice like a Christian crusader, ‘In kingdom come, thy will be done. Thank the Lord, here they come!’

  The Fishman peered over the rims of his sunglasses, and it was true whether from his good eye or the glass one, for the young followers were running, and others followed through the swaying branches of the spearwood trees. They were coming alright. The Rasta boys, under ash, with Will Phantom stumbling along, half dragged by the sheer willpower of the Rastafarian god men.

  Privately to the Fishman, the two young men, still winded by their efforts to return to the camp, explained in his ear what had happened. ‘We come along, like you said, and we are saying, “We are bringing the Fishman’s gift of life”.’ They said they believed Will Phantom was just a man wishing to die. ‘You better off watching him. He’s got a death wish. A date with death. Can’t stop him.’

  ‘We should have left him there.’ The young blokes complained in a haughty manner, although suffering from smoke inhalation which hampered them from talking more, and burns. Will lay on the ground in front of them. Explaining their difficulties, they said, ‘We could have been killed a half-a-dozen times because of him.’

  ‘We want you to know he doesn’t listen to a fucking thing.’

  Finally, they explained how he went back, they had to chase after him, while he looked for the two dead men from the mine. ‘We were nearly half baked alive, crawling on our bellies through a bloody spinifex inferno. You couldn’t breathe nothing but fire, all the while, trying to pull him out of there.’ Finally, exhausted, the two young men ceased talking. Ignoring the Fishman, and bending over with their hands on their knees, trying to catch their breathe, both cast a hostile glance over at Will.

  ‘Yeah! Yeah!’ The Fishman hurried them along, anxious to hear what else they had to say.

  ‘We found the buggers dead of course. We dragged them out of there, with clumps of spinifex exploding into flames everywhere you looked, and the bloody fire, chasing us.’

  ‘And!’

  ‘They are just over there.’ One of the lads indicated across the lagoon with a hand he barely lifted from his knee. ‘And we aren’t touching em again, neither.’ Fishman went over to Will and gave him a fatherly pat on the back. ‘Good job lad.’ He got him some water, then called some of the men to go and bring the bodies back from the bush. Soon enough, the two charred bodies were laid out at the feet of the Fishman.

  ‘I guess we had better bury them,’ he decided. ‘We better get to work and bury them. Over there in the bush,’ he said finally, looking back towards the road.

  ‘No, we are not, we are not burying them at all.’ The Fishman looked around on hearing Will speak, and saw him standing, completely covered in ash, dust and congealed blood, but there was no doubt, it was the familiar Will Phantom’s easy stance. On first glance the Fishman was reminded of Norm some thirty years ago, standing in front of him with the same ease: calling it quits to their dual leadership on the religious road.

  ‘You remember Elias’s boat?’ Will spoke quietly into Fishman’s ear – lest the wind heard and told the trees.

  Fishman nodded, remembering the unpleasant, hot day they had found poor, old Elias, sitting out there in the middle of the lagoon, and thinking he was there fishing, but knowing that dead men don’t fish.

  ‘Well! What do you think, hey? If we get that boat from up the hill over there, and we leave those two there for the crows to feed on?’ Will talked on. He took no notice of the look of concern growing on the Fishman’s face.

  The older man had shocked himself, when he unwittingly looked inside the charred skin of the two broken bodies that had been dragged one way or the other through hell. There, their spirits lay, unable to move, as though locked in limbo, and from their heads stared frightened eyes which jumped left and right at every rustle in the bush to which Will wanted to condemn them. Instantly, deep sorrow moved Mozzie to forget his own grievances and to make a sober decision. There was no thirst for revenge. Whatever it was, was quenched. He had no mind left for the callousness of Will. Instead, he replied, ‘We going to bury em decent. Decent. You understand me Will?’

  ‘No, I respect you. You are the boss, but I got to do this,’ Will replied just as determinedly. ‘They killed Elias. Left him here like he was just fish bait, and, yesterday! Yesterday they killed Hope. These bastards threw her out of the helicopter. And now, I don’t know for sure, but they might have killed Bala as well. So, I am going up there to get Elias’s boat, even if I got to do it myself, and I am going to leave them there to rot, until they are found by the people over there at the mine.’

  ‘Eye for an eye is it Will?’

  ‘Yeah! From now on it is.’

  ‘You know what will happen if you leave them in the boat, don’t you? Their ghosts will come haunting you whenever you are in the water. Leave them in a boat and they will come rowing over any sea and throw evil at you until they kill you. So, now I am telling you no more. You listen to me. You got to bury them decently, no matter what they did.’

  ‘I couldn’t care less. You will have to kill me first before you bury them in our sacred country. If they got holy country somewhere for killers, well let the mine take them there and bury them themselves. This is our own sanctified country, not theirs. They got no place here.’


  ‘Alright, have it your way, it’s your life. But I am warning you. You’d be better off picking your targets. Leave no tracks and biding your time. What can I tell you? I am only an old man. No use listening to me. What can I do? I got my only sons plus one other little fella I didn’t even know, to bury.’

  Will looked on sympathetically while the Fishman continued talking, now that he was able to tell someone what had happened in Desperance. He recalled how the convoy had arrived at the lagoon, and while they were coming in, he was naming who came in which cars. He had been taking careful note of who was driving, their driving ability, and the condition of the car. Everyone had set up camp at the lagoon, and finally now the spirit trees knew who was there, you could see something was wrong in how they were dancing when the wind started to blow up suddenly like a telephone was ringing.

  ‘It was a bad business what happened next. There was only a wind talking through the trees, that was all, then all of a sudden, everyone was saying, ‘What’s that? Sounds like engine noise.’ Everyone was a bit worried because we know the sound our cars make.

  ‘Anyway, a late car turned up. Seventies model Holden station wagon rode in flat chat, “Look out,” reckless driver and all, coming down the road into the lagoon. Did it belong to the convoy everyone was asking, and I said, no it did not. I knew who it belonged to, it belonged to the family of that silly, old troublemaker – Joseph Midnight, same man. So, I said to Midnight’s car, when it pulled up in front of everyone and before anyone could get out, “You got no respect coming in here like this. I don’t like what you are doing here,” I told them.’

  Will perfectly understood the significance of this story because everyone knew that old man Joseph Midnight and the Fishman had nothing to do with each other. Both were like his own father Norm Phantom. Stubborn old mules who anchored their respective clans in the sordid history of who really owned different parcels of the local land. Fishman claimed the lagoon, and not just the lagoon either. The old war went right up the coastline to Desperance and out to sea. Will remembered hearing the Fishman explaining that he was the living bible of all times. ‘I am pointing to my brain,’ he said, pushing his fingers into his head. ‘Inside here is the whole history of your government. I can tell you if everything is correct, right back to when time began, before Adam and Eve. I can tell you perfectly for four hundred years, the Midnight people have been doing the wrong thing.’ The Fishman had taken Will Phantom out to the spinifex where the mine was to be built. Following the old man’s yellow cat eyes, Will watched the warring spirits falling from the skies in the middle of the night to fight on the flat lands until close to dawn, before fading away. ‘I see everything,’ the old man said with the utmost sincerity in his voice. ‘And you come along with me and I will show you because I have been alive forever.’

  When the mine was built it exacerbated the situation because it created a window of opportunity for Joseph and his family to start making Native title claims over the area. So, Fishman said, he told Joseph to his face, ‘If I see you anywhere around the lagoon I will kill you with a spear.’ Old Norm did not get involved in the dispute but Will remembered him still, slinging on about those greedy Midnight pigs, ‘trying to justify whatever’, in a long-forgotten string of accounts to justify the family feud. The whole lifestyle of old Joseph Midnight’s family grew into one sick family joke about pigs slopping around in their sty, waiting for scraps from the mine.

  ‘So, I told them Midnight boys before they had a chance to get out of the car – “You got no ceremony here. You got to go back to your own country. Joseph Midnight’s country is a long way off to the West somewhere, salt water and water buffalo where the wild people are living. Go and fight them if you are looking for trouble and you might get lucky enough to get your land back”.’

  Even in the light of a quarter moon, the Fishman said he was smart enough to see the frightened looks in the eyes of the young men, so, even while thinking he was getting soft in the head, he let them talk. A young voice from inside the car finally spoke. ‘Don’t get hot under the collar, old man, we will be going. Grandfather sent us to tell you something and we are sorry to have to be the ones that’s got to say any bad news to you.’

  Will understood when the Fishman paused in this story of his to talk about his premonitions before leaving Desperance. He said he was no angel, but he was listening to the sound of angels singing like when you feel something bad is about to happen. All the way, while driving down to the lagoon, Fishman said he did not know what it was, but his mind was in overdrive, waiting for something to happen. As he became trapped in the quagmire of his imagination, he said he had tried to gasp one single image, but the kaleidoscope refused to come into focus.

  ‘It had to be in one of the cars – it was so close,’ he said of the sensation which gripped his mind and was, by now, all over the place. All he could think was that one of the cars in the convoy was about to roll. ‘I stopped the cars must of been ten times, got out, and told them off for not driving more carefully.’ Every car kept slipping through his mind, while he was trying to figure out who the spook was, not driving his car properly.

  ‘Imagine that!’ he spoke quietly. ‘But it was too hard, I couldn’t see it because I had no faith in my own premonitions. They were the last ones – my own flesh and blood. It was why I could not see them, could not explain, could never picture their future, because they never had one. Poor little boys.

  ‘So, the voice says to me, “The cop killed them, maybe. Maybe, Bruiser, too, because they both flogged them really terrible”. Well! I know what Bruiser is like. And you know too that town has gotten worse since the mine came. Killed three little boys, babies really, my kids. Stupid Gordie the reason being, although you can’t really blame him can you? Poor thing. I had to think then. Think about what was happening here. Think about why. Why my sons, and not theirs, killed for nothing? I kept thinking it was strange how things were starting to happen around here – all since the mine. Strange, how ordinary people were getting killed, I thought. Innocent people like children. My children. First time I can ever remember, when I did not know what would happen from one day to the next. We always used to know when somebody got killed. Know it. What happened. So, I said to myself, where did it all start? First time, when they got rid of Elias, because he was your friend.’

  Will nodded, and listened while the Fishman continued, reflecting on his story. They walked into the bush and finally, they were standing next to the three small bodies wrapped with blankets. ‘Bruiser, it had to be Bruiser,’ he said.

  ‘I think Bruiser killed Gordie because he started to be too efficient at his job. Gordie must have had something on Bruiser, so he killed him, then he got the boys to make it look like they did it. I had those Midnight boys out of the car. My blokes dragged them out and made them talk. Well! They knew nothing about anything it seemed. They said nobody knew why anyone wanted to kill Gordie and everyone thought the boys did it. But you know Will, I know they never did it. I wasn’t much of a Father, but they couldn’t have killed anyone.

  ‘Well! Anyhow, I let those Midnight boys go home. Shouldn’t have. They were pleading to join up with the convoy but I wouldn’t let them. I told them, “I got no use for any of you so you may as well go back to your grandfather”. All I could think of was the amount of trouble they would be on the road. I told them to go back to Desperance, but they said their grandfather had told them to keep going. He said Desperance was no place for young boys anymore. They said they were leaving forever. They were heading South.’

  The Fishman said he had selected a dozen young men to stay behind while he had the convoy move out and told them, ‘Even if I don’t get through, don’t survive this, the story has to go on. Nothing must stop our stories, understand?’ He turned away from the three bundles lying on the ground, and, as they walked back to the waiting men, Mozzie kept talking.

  ‘I sent men out to the mine with my orders, then two young fellas come flying back
with news, “Our Will’s over there”. That was alright, I sent them back to get you out, same time. The rest of us, we went back to Desperance then, travelling slow and easy, not looking like we were on the warpath with anyone. Silently, like mice, we drove into Desperance, two cars in the middle of the day, driving up the main street.

  ‘The whole place was deserted. No one took any notice what we were doing about the place. They probably are still trying to figure out what happened. We knew where they’d be alright. All Uptown was inside the pub meeting, like they always have a nice meeting together. Having a meeting, when they want to talk about something, like cleaning up all the rubbish in the town – like talking about us mob.

  ‘Well! I said I wanted to be a fly on the wall, and I was, so I heard them. They was all there, jammed in like sardines, and they were trying to figure out what to do about Truthful going mad inside the jail. So, I decided we would take Truthful too. But he was already dead. His rope was still swinging. Sill warm. We take my boys and the other little one as well, and all very quietly, we just slowly drove away and they were still having their meeting.’

  Will searched, perhaps half expecting to see the body of Truthful somewhere in the spearwood, or where the crows were perched in the branches breathing in the odours of death, or where the files were buzzing, but he only saw the black cloud of swarming flies hovering around the bodies of the blondie and his mate Cookie. Where was he? Will thought, still shocked at what Mozzie had said. But he could see nothing. Fishman thought he had better explain. ‘Don’t bother looking around for him. They asked, “You going to bring im too?” Meaning Truthful. And I said, “No way am I going to bring im down here”. His type don’t belong on our religious ground, anywhere near my boys – let them rest in peace. So, don’t go looking because you will never find him here. We left him in Bruiser’s house – that’s where he is. Sat him up to go cold on Bruiser’s personal reclining chair, waiting for Bruiser to come home, singing some old Dean Martin song. Bruiser was going to be hearing that song forever, haunting him, whispering in his ears when he is lying down sleeping in his bed, for the rest of his life. No, I told the men, “Let them look after their own, and we will look after ours”.’