Headhunters

by Mark Dawson

  Milton nodded down to the bag at his feet.

  “That it?” Matilda said.

  “That’s it.”

  “John doesn’t like to be tied down,” Harry elaborated with a chuckle, seemingly oblivious to the irony in his comment. He was a simple enough kind of bloke, not the sharpest tool in the shed, but was it possible that he hadn’t noticed the way the atmosphere had changed?

  “When are we off?”

  “No reason to wait.”

  “The others?”

  Matilda pushed herself upright, turned and pointed down the track. Milton saw the clouds of dust from the wheels of the other Jeep. It was already several miles away and he hadn’t noticed it before.

  “They left twenty minutes ago,” she said. “Mervyn was getting on my nerves, so I told him to do one.”

  Harry got up, too. “And he did what he was told,” he said. “Who would’ve thought a big bloke like that would be scared of my little sister?”

  Milton collected his bag and tossed it into the back.

  Matilda came across to him and rested her hand on his arm. “Ready?”

  He took a step to the side, hoping that Harry couldn’t see his awkwardness. “Whenever you are.”

  *

  THE JEEP had two seats up front and another two behind on the flip-up tailgate. Milton knew that Matty would drive, so he started for the back.

  “Up front with me, John,” she said before he could get very far. “If I know Harry, he’ll be asleep in ten minutes. I wouldn’t mind someone to talk to. Keep me awake.”

  He gritted his teeth. He couldn’t very well turn her down.

  She had been right about her brother. He made some derogatory comments about her driving and then, before they were off the track and onto the road, he was quiet. Matty looked in the rear-view mirror and smiled. Milton craned his neck and looked back. Harry was asleep, his head lolling against the seat and his mouth open.

  “Told you so,” she said.

  “I saw him sleep in places that were a lot less comfortable than this,” Milton said.

  “That right?”

  “One time, he got forty winks in the back of an army Lynx while we were being shot at over Basra. I was sure we were going to get hit. He woke up like nothing had happened.”

  Matty took her phone and connected it to the Jeep’s USB jack. She steered with one hand on the wheel, glancing up every so often as she used her spare hand to scroll through her music. She settled on Fleetwood Mac, and, after a moment, the opening of “The Chain” played through the speakers.

  “This about your era?” she said, grinning as she rested the phone on the dash.

  “Leave it out. You’re about twenty years too early.”

  “What would you rather listen to?”

  He leaned back in the seat and rested his boots on the dash. “The Smiths. The Stone Roses. The Happy Mondays.”

  “Who?”

  He allowed himself the luxury of a smile and tried to relax a little. It was an easy and companionable silence. Good music, the warm breeze on his face. Matilda was a good driver, maintaining a fast pace as she picked the smoothest route over the pitted asphalt.

  Fleetwood Mac finished and Guns N’ Roses replaced it, the gentle introduction to “November Rain.”

  Milton almost thought he was going to get away with it.

  “Last time,” she said.

  “Matty—”

  She glanced in the mirror. “He’s asleep. You know what he’s like. A bomb could go off and he wouldn’t wake. Relax.”

  He tried, but couldn’t.

  “Last time,” she started again, and he let her finish, “I’m sorry about the things I said to you.”

  “What things?”

  She looked over at him, her eyes reflecting the glow of the instruments. “I may have… questioned your manhood.”

  “No need to apologise.”

  “We didn’t finish the conversation.”

  “We did. There’s not much more to say. Nothing is going to happen.”

  “Why not?”

  “It just… isn’t.”

  “You don’t want it to?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “So?”

  “It can’t. Your brother. Come on, Matilda. You know how jealous he is. If anything went wrong…”

  “Why would it?”

  “Because it always does, Matty, and, when it does, he’ll kill me. He’s my friend. I don’t want to put that at risk.”

  They drove on for a minute in silence again.

  “That’s your final word?”

  He sighed. “It has to be.”

  “All right,” she said. “Fine.”

  “Fine?”

  “I’m not going to shout and scream about it, Milton, if that’s what you mean. I’m not going to flog a dead horse.” She turned and smiled at him—an incandescent smile that sent a quiver up his spine—and added, the smile fading a little, “Your loss.”

  Milton looked up into the expanse of the night sky. There was no natural light outside the Renegade and the vast sweep of the stars looked like diamonds scattered liberally across velvet. The moon was full, casting its reflected light down onto the landscape and lending it a silvery sheen. There were hills in the near distance, and Milton heard the howl of a dingo. Another joined, and then another, a mournful wail that drifted down across the dusty plain.

  It was his loss. He knew it.

  “There was one thing I always wanted to ask you,” Matty said.

  “Go on.”

  “Why did you come here? I know you know Harry, but why did you come out here to work on the station with us?”

  Milton was quiet as he considered what to tell her. “I wanted to get away from things,” he said.

  “Things?”

  “Oh, I don’t know—life, maybe. All the noise and the stress. I’m not best suited to it.”

  “This is the drinking thing?”

  He hadn’t told her about AA and his daily struggle to stay dry, but she knew that he didn’t drink and he could tell that it was something that had piqued her curiosity. Perhaps Harry had said something to her. “It’s to do with that,” he said.

  “You have a problem with it?”

  “Me and drink don’t make for the best combination.”

  “How long have you been sober?”

  “More than three years now.”

  “But you know that a sheep station isn’t the smartest place to go if you want to get away from booze, right?”

  “I do now.” He smiled. “But I can handle it.”

  “So it’s just about that, then? The booze?”

  He paused again. No, he conceded to himself. That wasn’t it. He thought about Avi Bachman and the chaos that he had brought down upon Isadora and Alexander Bartholomew in New Orleans. He thought about Ziggy Penn, abducted and nearly killed. And then he thought about the beating that he had taken at Bachman’s hands. But not just any beating: a thorough, comprehensive beating that had left him on his knees and just a few extra blows from death. Milton was not used to being bested like that, and it had shaken him. He had left Louisiana aboard a Greyhound bus to Florida, but the memory of what had happened was not so easy to leave behind. To have been beaten so easily had made him question the point of the daily struggle to stay off the drink. Why not just get drunk? What was the point in the struggle? It had made him question a fundamental part of himself. If that had been taken away so easily, was his struggle really worth the effort?

  “John?”

  “What?”

  “There’s no other reason?”

  He realised she was probing for evidence of another woman, a failed relationship, some other reason why he would do something so extraordinary as swapping what she must have imagined was a comfortable life for a summer spent up to his knees in shit and sweat and blood.

  “That’s it,” he said. “I just wanted a change.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  THEY ARRIVED a
t Boolanga at two in the morning. Milton hit the sack and managed four hours of sleep, waking as the morning sunlight lanced through the uncovered windows. He lay still for a while, watching motes of dust as they drifted through the bright golden shafts, taking the opportunity to assess his body. He had the usual aches and pains that would be associated with a physical job, the stiffness in his muscles and the creaking of joints that had been pushed beyond their capacity. Beyond those were the injuries that had accumulated over the years of his previous life. The stabbings, shootings, the beatings that he had taken. His body had been put through it, the toll severe enough that he occasionally had to resort to medication to soothe the aches. He tried not to—he didn’t want to exchange one addiction for another—but there had been days when he had no choice.

  He closed his eyes and probed deeper. Avi Bachman had inflicted serious punishment: the dislocated shoulder, fractured ribs, a concussion so severe that he was still getting headaches two weeks later. Those wounds had all healed. Thinking about them recalled the fight again. He had only been able to save himself because Bachman had been distracted. Milton had taken a metal crank and swung it into Bachman’s head when his back had been turned. It wasn’t gallant, but he didn’t care about that. Most of Milton’s victims had been murdered without even knowing that he was there and, in this case, it was the only reason he was still breathing. Gallantry was a luxury that he couldn’t afford.

  Matilda, Harry, Mervyn and Eric were outside the dormitory. They were dressed for work. The air was baking hot already. The sheep in the pens were making an enormous racket, as if aware of the indignities that were about to be visited upon them. Someone had prepared bacon rolls. They were eating them and drinking from big litre bottles of water.

  Harry tossed one of the rolls over to Milton. “Wakey, wakey.”

  Milton was starving. He bit into the roll and savoured the salty bacon.

  “We were just saying,” Matilda said. “We should make it interesting today. You still up for it?”

  “Sure.”

  “We each put fifty bucks into the pot and whoever shears the most sheep takes it all.”

  “Fine,” Milton said, ignoring the fact that gambling was another compulsive behaviour that he was probably not best suited to indulge in.

  “You want,” she said, smiling, “I could give the rest of you five sheep as a head start.”

  “We’ll manage, Matty,” Harry said.

  She grinned. “This is going to be fun.”

  *

  MILTON WORKED HARD. He settled into a groove, muscling the uncooperative sheep into his pen and wielding his clippers with a dexterity that he would have said was impossible just a few weeks earlier. The set-up at Boolanga was more amenable than at Booligal. The sheep were kept in a large corral, with an Aboriginal station hand responsible for shepherding the next one forward when there was a vacancy in the pens. Milton kept a tally, scoring a line on one of the wooden fence panels with the blade of his shears as he waited for the next sheep to arrive.

  The first hour passed. “How many?” Matty yelled out.

  “Ten,” said Harry.

  Mervyn had nine and Eric seven.

  “John?”

  “Eleven,” he said.

  “Fuck off.”

  “Straight up.”

  “Twelve,” Matty called back, dampening his excitement. “Keep up, boys.”

  Milton glanced out across the pens. Harry was in the one next to him and Matilda was in the one adjacent to that. She had already bent back down to the next sheep and was stripping off the wool with easy, practiced strokes. She was wearing a muscle top beneath her dungarees and her skin was already awash with sweat, animal waste and wispy balls of wool that had stuck to her. She finished the sheep, ushered it on its way with a kick to its flanks and looked up. She noticed that Milton was gazing at her, and grinned.

  “You all right?” Harry called across to him.

  Matty winked.

  Milton couldn’t suppress the smile. “Yeah,” he said. “Miles away.”

  “Looks like it. This ugly bastard is number twelve. You’re falling behind.”

  *

  IT GREW ridiculously hot as noon approached and Harry called out that they would stop for an hour to refresh themselves and shelter from the worst of the sun. Matilda protested, but not too much; Milton could see that she was suffering as much as the rest of them. They revealed their tallies and Harry had forged ahead by four animals. Milton was in third, behind Matty but ahead of Mervyn and Eric. That did not go down well.

  They got back to it again. The afternoon dragged on. The heat was oppressive, a crushing weight that lay across them all. Milton’s wide-brimmed leather bush hat offered a little shade, but did nothing to take the edge off the volcanic temperature. His sweat soaked into the leather and, after a while, he stopped trying to deter the swarms of flies that gathered around the squealing animals from alighting on his face. Harry seemed to be struggling with his legs, cursing as he wrestled a difficult ewe into position. Milton marked each shorn animal on the wood, and, when Harry called out that he had just finished his eightieth, he saw that he was five ahead of him. Matilda was still working with steady efficiency, but she was quiet, not announcing her tally, and Milton couldn’t see across Harry’s pen well enough to see her count.

  The last animal was ushered into Mervyn’s pen a little before six. The sun was low in the sky, but it was still blazing hot. Milton finished his sheep, shooing it out of the pen and carving the final notch into the wood. He counted and then recounted his tally: he had managed one hundred and eleven animals. His shirt was sodden with sweat and he was bleeding from several small cuts. One particularly obstreperous ewe had bitten him on the wrist and the indentations from its teeth were starting to turn a dark red. He was exhausted and he needed to sit down.

  “Done!” Harry called out.

  “How many?”

  “One hundred and three. You?”

  “One eleven.”

  “Piss off, Milton.”

  “I’m serious. One eleven.”

  “Well, fuck me sideways,” he said, shaking his head. “You beat me.”

  “By eight. It’s your legs.”

  “Fuck off, John. No excuses. You beat me.”

  Eric and Mervyn finished and reported numbers of ninety-seven and ninety-nine.

  They waited for Matilda. She was finishing her last sheep, stripping the wool away in two neat sections and tossing it aside. She booted the sheep up the arse and watched it trot to the others, bleating its dissatisfaction.

  She leaned back against the pen and wiped the sweat from her eyes. When she brought her arm away, she was grinning and Milton knew that he had lost.

  “How many?” Harry asked.

  “One fifteen.”

  “Serious?”

  “One fifteen. Money’s mine, boys. Drinks on me.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  MILTON WASN’T quite sure what happened next. The plan had been for them all to drive into the nearest town for food and drink. Then Harry decided he was done in, saying that he was going to pass and get an early night. Mervyn, who had been struggling with a hangover all day, took that as permission to decline the festivities himself, admitting that the idea of another night of booze was not something that he had been relishing. Without his wingman, Eric very quickly backed out, too. Milton knew that he would also have had an eye on the prospect of being an interloper on a night where it was only Matty and Milton to keep him company. The two shearers might not have been the brightest, but it seemed obvious enough to Milton that they had noticed the atmosphere between the quiet pommie and their foreman’s kid sister. Milton let the thought play out: if they had noticed it, then surely Harry had noticed it, too. And Harry didn’t have a problem with Milton and Matty going out together. Did that mean he didn’t mind the idea of them having a relationship? Milton shook his head at the way his thinking was leading him. Milton had never been the most empathetic of men, and th
is was confusing him.

  He decided to back out himself. It was a bad idea. He went to find Matty to tell her. She was in the Jeep, the engine running. Before he could even open his mouth, she raised a hand to stifle his protest.

  “Relax,” she said. “Just a drink. Well, a drink for me, and whatever you want—water or whatever—for you.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yep. That’s it. I’m going out anyway. I’ve got money in my pocket and I need a beer and a change of scenery. You can either come with me and make sure I don’t do something stupid, or I’ll go alone and God alone knows what’ll go down.”

  “Fine. I’ll come.”

  *

  THE TOWN OF BROKEN HILL was thirty miles away. The road was decent once they got off the station, and they made good progress, heading west on the A32. Matilda was in a good mood, her spirits buoyed by the day’s events. She jabbed at Milton with a little good-natured gloating. He didn’t mind. It was good to see her smiling and, the tension between them at least temporarily defused, he was able to relax. He had no intention of taking a drink, and knowing that he would be sober all night, he was confident that he would be able to deflect her should her new-found resolution when it came to their relationship start to waver.

  “I’ll take you to a restaurant I know,” she said. “It’s called the Silly Goat. They do these amazing burgers. My mouth’s been watering all afternoon just thinking about it.”

  Milton stretched out his legs as far as he could and allowed himself a smile. His life wasn’t really so bad. He was fortunate enough that he wasn’t driven by material things. He wasn’t ambitious, either. He just wanted a quiet existence, the opportunity to try different things and experience the parts of the world that he hadn’t visited before. He had known that coming here would prove to be a good idea, and he had been right. He had no obligations, no responsibilities, and he could find tranquillity through the medium of hard work. The harder he worked, the more tired he became, and the easier it was to silence the demons in his head. And then, as a pleasant bonus, he had evenings like this to enjoy.

  “Look,” Matilda said. “Up ahead.”