He thought about something else he could not see, a smell perhaps, travelling in the breeze, which might have triggered a single vision in the minds of perhaps a quarter of a million seagulls, who had without doubting, taken flight and headed towards the flooding lakes carrying fish that had fallen like food from the skies. This was the root of ultimate trust he thought, the knowledge of intuition, of understanding the vibrations of subtle movement in the environment. Birds, acting in unison on this slim chance, like a note struck on a piano, and no different to himself, a simple creature after all, were sealing the fate of the next generation.
He continued walking through the dew-covered grasses and the mulurru-turpentine bush, towards a rocky ledge to see whether he could gain a closer view. There, while standing at the highest point before making his descent to the mud plains far below, the mists parted. For several moments the doors were ajar on Desperance and the sun streamed down on the town. From his estimation of the distance he still had to travel, he hoped to be at Desperance by dusk.
Yet, in this simple uncovering, Will Phantom also glimpsed the town’s psychosis twinkling in the sunshine. He sighed at the malady of small white-town madness creating another eyesore to feed itself. Irritated he asked himself: Could nothing change down there? He knew his cynicism about Desperance was cruel compared to its naive innocence, but unlike his father, Will deliberately strove not to be caught up in the butterfly net of thoughts which monopolised, hypnotised and tantalised the eyes of the world, especially Pricklebush. He knew one thing and in this, he remained steadfast. He did not want to grow old saying his role in life was to be a watcher in the long grass of Uptown.
The busy, industrious, toiling residents of Desperance had been up like the larks, dressed in woodchopping gear, a brush-stroke image of working Australiana, straight off a Pro Hart canvas, chopping down the remaining few poor, poor old trees. Every man had his chainsaw. Dozens revved. Mango trees – Baaaarrrrrzip! Cedar trees – Raaaarrrrip! Poinsettia trees – Zipped. What would you give for this tree? Such magnificent trees, decades in the making, were once shade in long, bright, burning summers. Poof! No joke. Straight out, lying now, down without a lie, cactus-smacktus, holus-bolus, flat out on the ground. This was called: The Great Bat Drive. Will whispered to himself the name the town had given to the annual ritual when tens of thousands of fruit bats, Pteropus scapulatus – as thick as flies and fleas if you please, flew up the river towards the coast and, having circumvented the net, descended like a plague onto the town.
When Will Phantom was a boy he saw the dog responsible for this madness. Never had there been a dog alive so consumed by its own stupidity. So, good job, serves itself right, it died from a bat bite – so say all of us. Apparently, the dog belonged to old man Joseph Midnight, but when the bat bit it, he said it never belonged to him at all. It was Norm Phantom’s dog, he claimed. It was unnatural for a dog to attack a bat but it happened because bats and dogs were both too numerous for a small place like Desperance, so they were bound to collide.
When the dog and bat bit each other, the bat flew away precariously, this way and that, lopsided like a drunk, all crumpled wing, with dog flesh in its teeth. The dog had immediately fallen on the ground, legs up and howling. It looked as though it was having convulsions. The dog suffered immensely, with a fever so great, perspiration was dripping from its skin, froth from its mouth, and its eyes bulged from its head. No one would touch it. By this stage a crowd of people had gathered around to look. Then, when the dog rose from the ground everyone pushed back: Back, back and give it room.
So, keeping well out of its way, they watched the dog rage, whilst wobbling with jelly legs, up and down the main street. Then, out of the blue, Will had gone straight up to the dog and killed it right in the middle of the road in front of everyone, by bashing it over the head with a stick. He might have taken it home if it was his father’s dog, but it wasn’t, it was only old man Midnight’s dog, so, what the heck? It didn’t matter. Instead, he took the injured bat home and made a juicy barbecue of it on his little campfire down the back. All the Phantom kids ate it.
In town though, the bats had made a reputation for themselves after the incident with the dog. All kinds of legends jumped out of the woodwork about bad bat bites. Elaborate stories circulated on paper from the Council about the effect of falling bat urine on human skin, of inhaling bat spit, or of bodily contact with bat fur, and with so many years passing since Will killed the dog, a little bit of suspicion had gone a long way. Bats were high on the town’s list of things that can go wrong in the world. Everyone now believed bats carried a deadly disease. A disease which could spread to humans through the treasured fowl pens: If you looked closely.
Nobody really saw bats anymore. Showers of bat piss caught the imagination instead. Nobody walked the streets at night during the mango season because nobody had any trouble visualising the deadly virus pissing on the town. Poor Uptown kids crying every night, could be heard right down in the malirriminji-Pricklebush camps: Don’t make us go to sleep. Seven o’clock at night fearing the whole town would be found dead in bed the next morning. It was a sad, sad, self-perpetuating sad town. Nobody had any idea how those kids grew up so fearful of the world and everything.
So that was the origin of the bat and the dog story. Witnessed and assimilated. No one ever bothered to claim the dog, so eventually, it was removed by the Council. That too was one of the local proverbs that lived from the story and Will Phantom gained a reputation as being a violent person. Someone who would strike another as would a virus, was how Will Phantom was interpreted through the bat and dog story. The retelling of Will in Uptown was as vivid and as crystal clear as hearing that original, fatal Thud! on the dog’s head, through those reliving it all again. And again: It sounded just like this, Thud! Will remembered when he was a kid how he responded to the talk of the town. It had made him feel destined to be out of kilter with the neighbours but he loved his persona. For fun he ran up and down Uptown singing ‘Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap’. So, whatever he was suspected of, and suspicion fell on him far too easy, it was because he was always seen through eyes tainted by this one significant story.
So, the great bat drive. Shotguns were fired into the air, firecrackers crackled, more chainsaws kept the noise up, and the occasional explosive let off by Carmen, the fish and chip lady, who sometimes doubled as the pyrotechnic, shook the ground. All of this was reminiscent of previous encounters between the town and the bats. The drive would last a whole day, until either Uptown ran out of Panadol tablets for their headaches, or the bats became tired of flying in circles around the town, trying to land, only to be exploded back into the skies in showers of their own stinking urine, their tiny brown eyes looked longingly back towards the river. Finally, flying away from the destruction of fallen trees, they headed up the river corridor, following the freshly open, pale yellow river-gum blossoms that filled the air with a sweet honey-scented perfume. There, they would eat and expel a foul-smelling, pungent gum-blossom-aroma-like shit, as they moved all the way back up to the freshwater springs and rock caves, several hundred kilometres inland.
It was incongruous that with a clear view of the enormous clouds swinging across the coast, which ought to have been enough warning for anyone on earth that a cyclone was heading their way, with winds that would strip the trees clean of foliage, so that they might end up looking like bones with branches sticking out of the earth forever, the town chose instead to turn a blind eye, and continued with the ceremony of belonging it had created for itself. The sounds of Uptown and the thoughts of watery births clashed into each other in Will’s mind, as he started his descent from the hills. The white-flowing curtains of misty rain continued to blow across his path. Frequently, in the flight overhead by flying foxes, seagulls, sea birds large and small flying inland, he saw a cyclone bird, the spiritual messenger of the ancestral creation serpent. This big black bird was the ultimate signal that a big rain was coming.
The noise of
the town faded away in the clouds, and the sound of the wind blowing the mist became more prominent, as Will Phantom ploughed on down to the muddy road which he would follow until he reached the town. He still had many kilometres to travel, and walking the straight road to Desperance, he again became absorbed by thoughts of finding the beautiful face and body of Hope swimming under the water, always moving ahead, her long brown hair flowing back. At times, he felt so close to her, he thought if he could reach out, he would be able to touch her hair. So close was this vision he held of her, and always just a moment out of his reach, he was convinced she was urging him on to the place where they would finally be reunited. He spoke to her, reassuring her he would go any place of her choosing. He saw their reunion in the blue of a sea desert, and he was convinced she and he would be alive in this place.
The optimism of this reality felt so near to achievement, he almost fell after it when it disintegrated and disappeared in the wavering of mist closing like light curtains in the flickering of the breeze. He rethought their reunion, trying to capture some unapparent feature in the flat ocean of the vision he had just seen, to pinpoint a location, a direction to travel. Nothing resurfaced of this broken dream. The images could not be properly remembered or held up for scrutiny like a photo of a place, or a map.
Hours passed while he continued on, fiddling with his daydreams, until new sounds interrupted his thoughts. The distraction was the rumbling of tyres churning through mud coming towards him along the fog-blanketed road. Realising the cars were coming from the direction of the town, Will stood back, and listened. He heard several drivers doing what they ought to know you cannot do: drive fast over the claypan roads when they are wet.
He knew instantly the town was evacuating. The Bureau of Meteorology had called and translated the message from the ancestral spirits. Drivers were panicking because they could not get out fast enough. The wheels of cars were spinning out of control as they spun sideways in the mud, sending them off into the green slime sludge on the side of the road where their engines roared even louder, as their wheels churned up mud, spat it out behind, and became hopelessly bogged. He could hear people yelling – Shit on it, AND fucking get that fucking, rust bucket, useless jalopy out of the fucking way or I will fucking run over ya. It was like that and so forth.
Turpentine bush and spinifex grass growing on the side of the road and spreading across the mudflats with nothing taller in sight, were as good as a tumble weed for camouflage, so, some distance from the road, Will stood like a shadow in the mist. It was too late to move, but he was almost out of view of anyone seeing him, as the sounds of the chaotic exodus from Desperance closed in. Suddenly, the red light on the roof of the police car spun rays that hung lines of red smoke through the mist, then the motorcade burst through the clouds.
An ashen-faced Bruiser drove the police car he had commandeered from the empty police station. Beside him sat the schoolteacher, Danny Real, looking like he was about to die. Will was close enough to notice that Bruiser was carrying a shiny blue-glass rosary, threaded through the hand clutching the steering wheel. The siren screeched, but his glassy blue eyes were firmly fixed on the road ahead. In the deafening racket of the siren, Will could now plainly hear the car horns beeping and honking right back towards Desperance. Blue car after red car, all-colour cars, shapes and condition filed down the south road, all filled with the frightened-face folk of Uptown absorbed by worries of flight. They had left without a single glance back. Their fearful lips recited prayers loudly in closed cars. Nobody looked at the rain-bathed countryside. All eyes were on the road. Cars impatiently honked their horns. Drivers panicked for their car to be ahead of the one in front. Everyone shouted for others to move faster.
Will watched the people, the kindest to the meanest, with heads in and out of their car windows, screaming wildly at the ones in front to get a move on. We will all end up dead because of you. The drivers in front yelled back saying how they could not go any faster, and along with a string of abuse claimed: You will kill us all if you don’t shut up. He saw the people of Desperance who had never in their lives gone down this road before, sitting quietly in their cars, apparently accepting the fate of the mystery road. Other faces, planted with shock by the thought of having their personal dreams and hopes doomed, stared into space. He saw most people had no time to gather anything to take with them except their most valued possessions. The family dog in a Catholic family’s car. An old ginger cat. Many carried the prized Desperance roosters and hens. Last, towards the end of the motorcade, came a string of Aboriginal families in Uncles’ cars, a red and black Zephyr, a cream and tan Ford Falcon, and sun-bleached Ford Cortinas of dull blue, squatting low and spurting exhaust fumes into the mud. Cattle trucks followed behind. In the back sat all the old people, some younger men, but mostly women with children – all of the Pricklebush mob now – chanting and singing.
Inside the back of the very last truck, Old Joseph Midnight slowly rocked from side to side. The truck was churning along at a snail’s pace. Aboriginal driver, Will tried to remember who he was: Chilla! Chilla something or other, Mooch. Moochie. Middle-aged fellow always wearing one of those blue peaked caps. Moochie had been working real hard. You could tell from the mud-stained singlet he was wearing over his fat belly. The main ordeal was over as far as Moochie was concerned. Face like a codfish and casually smoking his cigarette. He looked like he was the only person prepared to accept the conditions of the road.
Moochie was talking about how many times over the years they had been told by the white people – ‘Oh! Yaah! Another cyclone coming. We are all going to end up dead one day, you wait and see.’ ‘You get sick and tired of them telling you that,’ he yelled as if he was talking to the whole motorcade, although he was only talking to someone called Fish.
‘People Uptown telling you, looking at wese living – “Ah! Ha! One of these days you are going to get ripped apart”.’ He yawned, attempting to pacify his already pacified passengers sitting up in the cab of the truck. Fish chose not to speak, and Moochie continued to offer more highlights from his mind.
‘It is going to go around the town like the last time they got us evacuating for nothing and we should have stayed there if you ask me.’
The people in Moochie’s truck had experienced false alarms about cyclones many times over in their lifetime, and even though this one seemed to have all the ingredients to cause havoc and the so-called Wreck and ruin, they saw no point in hurrying, or being heartbroken about their homes being destroyed. ‘Better to get there safe than sorry, I suppose,’ Moochie drawled on. He had barely taken any notice of the panic in town. ‘Whatever,’ he said, replying to the instructions from ‘stand-in’ policeman Bruiser, who told him that he could drive the truck if he went around and made sure no one was left behind. ‘Who’s he to go around appointing himself policeman? Where was Truthful anyway? Isn’t it his job to organise an evacuation?’
The old man, sitting against the wooden slats on the side of the truck where he was stuck with dozens of others, was the only person who looked at the land. He caught sight of Will standing in the mist. He had almost mistaken him for the trunk of a dead tree, but he looked again, knowing his eyes were not so good anymore, but he had looked at this country hundreds of times, and he knows for darn sure that there was no dead tree of any description along this stretch of road. Najba ngambalanya nanangkani karrinjana – There is a man standing there looking at us, he says, before recognising Will, but nobody takes any notice of what he has said.
‘What are you doing there?’ he asked Will with a flick of his hand.
‘Going home,’ Will replied with sign language.
‘But! Big cyclone coming, boy, everybody barrba, jayi, yurrngijbangka – you better come with us,’ old Joseph again indicated with his hands.
‘Can’t. I am going to find Bala and Hope,’ Will replied.
‘Better hurry – it won’t be long.’
‘How long?’ Will was starting to judge
the distance he still had to get to the town and find shelter.
‘Ngamiri. Nobody told me. Everyone kayi. Big fella coming this time – I heard them, barraku talking. Cover the town. Everything will go. Listen to the ocean. Soon. Warawara yanja ngawu ninya lajib.’
‘Alright, old malbu – until next time,’ Will replied.
‘Your damu Daddy too. Where ninji Murriba – who knows? Until next time, baki, yarrbanji.’
Will was struck by the humility of the old man, and kept looking at him as the truck yawned its way ahead, then disappeared like the end of a fairy story, into the clouds. Will followed the road into Desperance. He became conscious of what the sea ahead was doing once more, and although he knew it was kilometres away, he heard the spirit waves being rolled in by the ancestral sea water creatures of the currents, and conspiring with the spirits of the sky and winds to crash into the land as though it was exploding. The earth murmured, the underground serpent, living in the underground river that was kilometres wide, responded with hostile growls. This was the old war of the ancestors making cyclones grow to use against one another.
So much greater had the winds increased in intensity and speed, Will was struggling to stand upright by the time he made it into Desperance. He lurched from one power pole or concrete marker to another, flying across to grab onto whatever he could, to hold from being swept away. The ground was covered with moving water picked up by the wind and sent flying along with the rain against his legs. Somehow, he avoided the flying missiles of corrugated-iron sheets peeling off the rooftops; pieces of timber, bits large and small of blue or clear-coloured plastic, broken tree branches, and everything else that seemed to have been carried midair: plastic dolls, children’s toys, boxes and crates from the Pricklebush camps, and the contents of green garbage bags straight from the rubbish tip through the town. Will passed hundreds of the town’s poultry set free in the last precious moments by wise owners who had rushed to the chookyard and set the birds loose to fend for themselves. He dodged, weaved and ducked to avoid what had now become wet deranged bleeding balls of flesh as they were blown and bounced, nilly-pilly along the main road south and out of town.
Carpentaria Page 47