Car stops. Doors open. Feet crunch on the dead grass.
‘Look out! He’s the crazy bastard with the gun!’
‘G’day, Caesar.’
Fathers and company.
‘I never meant to kill no one.’
‘No one’s dead, Caesar. Now, suppose you give me that gun.’
‘I busted me arm, ya know.’
The men close in around him.
‘Well, we’d better get it looked at, then, hadn’t we?’
He is escorted to the car.
The stars watch from above. His people.
They can’t help him now.
No one can.
Inside the CIB car, on his way to Midland regional hospital, with the stale fingers of the evening’s enjoyment ripping at his small body, he babbles out the truth of everything.
Just as the sun is crawling over the hills to begin a new day, Elgin creeps into the camp. He has run and slipped and swum his way along the river, then over the paddocks.
Safe back at home, in his tent.
His young woman stares at his silhouette in the tent opening with chiding eyes. He is angry, yet ashamed, of her disapprobation.
‘Where ya bin, Elgin?’ she whispers, tired of asking the same question. Tired of trying to settle her thin husband’s turbulent soul.
‘Nowhere.’
He throws himself down on the blanket and lights up a cigarette. He cannot meet her dark, all-knowing eyes.
Blood from a rip in his arm where he got caught on a barbed wire fence, trickles down the brown skin like a teardrop.
‘Ya badly ’urt, ’oney?’ she murmurs.
‘No. Go back to sleep, Maydene.’
‘It’s almost mornin’, an’ ya been stealin’ again, Elgin! ’Ow can I go to sleep, with yaself moonin’ all over the countryside?’ she cries. ‘Ya only come out of jail last month, too. Ya want ole Fathers to flog ya again, or what?’
And Elgin was going to ride into camp on his white horse and unload all the beer. Everyone was going to gather around, and there would have been jokes and laughter and fun. His woman would have smiled at him and hugged him, and forgiven him— because he had brought some light into the dusty reserve.
He digs his hand into a pocket and pulls out one of Caesar’s necklaces. His feral eyes meet her bruised ones.
‘I got ya this, Maydene,’ he mutters.
‘Ooohh, Elgin! What ya tryin’ to do to me, boy?’ she weeps.
Elgin gets up abruptly, and moves outside. Muffled sobs pierce him like the first shafts of the orange-red sunlight from the new day.
HERBIE
THERE weren’t many Abos in our town; only the Corrigans and Herbie’s lot and, as the Corrigans and Herbie’s cousins were all grown up, Herbie was the only boong to go to our school. Perhaps this is why we all taunted and teased him, because he was different and us kids don’t like anything different.
Since this is all about Herbie, I reckon I’d better have a go at describing him. But this is real hard, because he was all thought: I mean, like, he’d look at you with those big, brown scowling eyes and he’d look right into you, so anything you knew, he’d know. Those eyes seemed to take up almost all of his face, then the nose, flat as a board and all nostrils, took up the rest. You never noticed his mouth, because he rarely spoke and never smiled. He’d flit around the shadows like a crow—he was black as one, too. His legs were long and thin like a crane’s and his arms were long and skinny. His hands were abnormally big and his fingers long, so he was clumsy. He wasn’t big and he wasn’t strong, Herbie, and they reckoned that was because he never got enough to eat. But he was an Abo, and they never do.
Whenever he came to school, he’d only sleep, so it weren’t really much good him coming. And us blokes used to smash him up, every break. Once the three Morgan boys locked him in the boys’ dunny and left him there all day. The next day he was caned for six for wagging school, but he never told. That was the good thing about Herbie: no matter what happened to him, he never told—not even on me, and I was one of the worst.
Herbie was a bad scholar, but there were many other things he could do well. No one but Herbie knew where all the wild bees hid their sweet, rich, brown honey. No-one but Herbie knew where to get the baby rabbits in spring, or where the foxes hid in holes in the Dongeran hills. Only Herbie knew where the ducks laid their eggs or where the kangaroos grazed. Only the thin, silent outcast could climb to the top of the highest trees and get the young birds or eggs out of the nests. And he knew where the few emus we still had in the district hid among the pink salmon gums. But most of all only Herbie, out of all of us blokes who had lived in the bush all our lives, really understood the hidden feelings of our land—or his, really, I suppose. I mean, like, he’d spend hours staring at a plant or pretty flower; he could lie still, hidden in the tall yellow grass, watching wild animals all day, and they wouldn’t know. Or, if they did, they never ran away. They were his mates and they, too, seemed to shrink away from us white fellahs: shy, silent and wild.
Yeah, we used to give that kid hell. Just some of the things we used to do was bury him in the sand by the footy goals or tie him up to the old bent redgum, by the hut in the middle of the playground where we’d have our tucker. Once me and Joey Gruger the German kid stuck him in a petrol drum and rolled him down Mile Hill. He went full belt into a black stump at the bottom, which must have nearly killed him. Then we all got around him while he sat on his knees and chucked up all over the ground. We laughed and Ally Moore rubbed Herbie’s face in the chunder and we laughed even louder. I reckon we all feel bad about that now.
We used to chase him around the footy oval, but usually we gave up before he did, because he was a good runner. Only Herbie could run ten miles non-stop—well, he had to, didn’t he, to get away from us blokes. But once we got him stumped when Kelly Ryan bought his Dad’s best stockwhip to school, and we all ran behind him, lashing him, just like mad old Jay Hiskee did to his horses in the team he still used.
Once we went too far, when Alfie Morgan painted ‘boong’ all over Herbie’s books: then his two brothers painted ‘boong’ all over Herbie, stripping the frightened boy naked ‘like a proper nigger ought to be’ as Jimmy, the wit of the Morgans, said. That night Dad brought a rumour home with him from the pub, that the Warandas (that’s Herbie’s family) had had a fight with the four Morgans—old Evan and his three boys, and had won, too, but since Dad was drunk as he could be, I hadn’t believed him. But the next morning, when I saw Alf’s face and the way Jimmy limped and the fact that Mick, who always came to school if only to annoy Herbie, was absent, I knew the old man was right. None of us asked the Morgans, of course, but the word went around the school.
I reckon we was scared a bit after that, but summer come on and Willy Harris nearly drowned Herbie in the waterhole and nothing happened to the Harrises. Of course nothing would, if the Warandas had any brains. There were only four Warandas now, since Dallas was in Freo, and ten Harrises. Still, being scared never really stopped us from bullying the thin, silent Herbie but the Morgans let up a bit.
The Morgans lived on the other side of the railway from the Warandas. Old Evan owned a couple of sheep and a cow, and a vicious Alsatian-Labrador. The dog was a real racist because he hated the Warandas. One day, Herbie was daydreaming along the street when the dog rose from the shade of the Co-op wall and charged him. Herbie got a bad bite on the leg, which left a white semi-circular scar. The dog chased the boy up a gum tree and kept him there for an hour before going away. The next morning the dog was found stiff as a drunk man, with a dirty big stake sticking in him. No one really knew who done it of course, ’cept old Morgan reckoned he knew. So that’s why the Morgans and Warandas was at war.
Like I said before, Herbie wasn’t liked by us bigger blokes, but not all the school was against this lonely outcast. The little kids liked him, and he loved little kids. He would show them baby rabbits and foxes and birds, he would carve them toys out of wood—and he was a go
od carver, too. He made my brother a real beaut dingo standing on a rock and I reckon all his skill must have gone into making that little figure. But that’s because he really adored my little brother. Yeah, Herbie loved the young ’uns of our town.
Then come the day I aren’t never going to forget. It was hotter then hell, and everything sort of wilted in the hot, white glare of the sun. It was after school, and us kids was all out around Herbie; pushing him around until he got so dizzy he fell on the ground. All us boys were showing off to the girls, who shrieked their applause like a mob of cockatoos. Suddenly big, shaggy Kevin Andrews, who had brains the size of a sheep turd and a face like a cowpat, yanked the scared kid to his feet and boomed out, ‘Yer gunna climb Big Smokey, boong, or I’ll piss all over yah an’ smack yah flaming face in. Orright, yah black c—t?’
Of course, the big nit had done both these things before, but this new torture sounded good fun so, with Andrews dragging the sorry, skinny figure, we all set off for Big Smokey.
I suppose I ought to tell you what Big Smokey is or else you won’t see the whole point of this new ordeal we was about to put the kid through. See, there’s this big old pine tree, dead as Banjo Patterson, right outside of town, a mile off. No one knows how it got there, but it must be a hundred years old, and it’s a good hundred feet high. Once when it was still alive, a fire come through and burned it. They reckon it smoked for three months and whether this is dinkum or not, us kids give it the name of Big Smokey. But, you see, no one was allowed to climb it on account of it being rotten.
Well, we got there and the jagged framework of Big Smokey towered away up into the sky. The tallest building in town was the pub, which was thirty feet, and only Ally Moore, who reckoned he was tough, had ever climbed onto the roof. We was all quiet while we waited for Kevin to do something. I reckon the dopey bugger was feeling bad at sending the kid up the tree, but to stop now would mean being beaten by a blackfellow, so he grunted, ‘Get up that tree an’ climb to the top, yah black bastard. If yah don’t, me an’ the others will be waiting ’ere for yah, see? An’ this time, we’ll give yah one proper workin’ over.’
Herbie was packing them, but he scurried up the tree. When he got out of our reach, he turned and scowled and called us names, so we got him with boondis and honky nuts. Mick Morgan hit Herbie fair on the bonce, so he climbed higher.
He kept right on climbing till he was well over halfway, until he was just a thin black speck on the greater, thicker, black trunk of the tree. All us kids was silent as a graveyard because we was sort of awed by the way he had beaten all us white blokes the way he had climbed so high.
Then, of course, it happened. None of us saw him grab the rotten branch, because the dying sun was in our eyes, but we seen him fall one hundred feet. He come down, breaking the smaller branches and bouncing off the bigger ones, then he hit the ground— splat! His yell sort of stopped halfway down, and then there was only silence except for a few girls screaming, us blokes with indrawn breaths, and Kevin Andrews chucking up.
Course, we’d nearly all seen an animal die, and the Harris’s and Ashtons had seen humans die—the Harrises Mum, who took a month to die of cancer; and Johnny Ashton’s brother, who fell among the plough. We was all old enough to know what death meant. But Herbie was different, because we all knew he should never have climbed the tree and we all knew we’d killed him.
I don’t know if you can picture our return to town. At first we were too scared to touch the still, crumpled black body, then Joey Gruger took off his grey greatcoat, which his dad had had in the German army, and placed it over Herbie’s body. After that, Skinner Flynn, whose Dad was a roo shooter, and Mick Morgan got their sheath knives out and we made a sort of stretcher. We put him on it, then we sort of went home.
It’s funny, but the only thing I thought of as we went home was that day, maybe two years back, when I had mucked up the kid’s new shirt. You see, old man Waranda was on the dole and he never got much money; all he did get went on beer or V.O. port. All Herbie wore, summer or winter, were a pair of dirty blue levis and an old T-shirt. Then one day he come to school in a new red-and-white check shirt. He was real proud of that shirt: we could see by the way he kept touching it with his hands, like it was a young rabbit, or fox, or bird, or something. Well, at break, us kids surrounded him and belted him up a bit, then I yanked him up off his feet and I said something like, ‘This shirt’s too good for a dirty black boong like you, so I reckon I’ll have it.’ Then I tore it off him and messed it up, then ripped it up and laughed into his face. He cried a bit, but he was an Abo so didn’t cry for long—he only hated me. I see now that it must have been the only absolutely new thing his family or anyone had ever given him.
The kids from town decided to go down to Waranda’s house on Saturday. They didn’t know what it was: curiosity, a chance to say ‘sorry’ or perhaps just something to do. The drooping gum trees along the dusty main street threw haphazard shadows onto the brown grass patches or white hot pavements. Down in the pink dam by the railway crossing, the water was still and flat, unbroken by the usual crowd of happy young children fishing or swimming. Today all the kids were at Waranda’s house, down opposite the line.
They had been there before, to the drab, faded weatherboard house. Then they had gone laughing, with pockets full of boondis to hurl at the large, lumbering Mrs Waranda, in the red-spotted dress she always wore. But today there were no cries of, ‘Boongman, boong-man; the Warandas are all boongs,’ or, ‘Tommy Waranda is a drunk old boong bugger,’ or, ‘Come out an’ fight, yah stroppy black bastards.’
Today the children were stealthy, guilty and silent, because Herbie was dead and they had killed him.
The house stood on bare, grey sand. Over by the wood heap, a chainsaw stood alone, unattended. The peppermint tree by the verandah drooped in the midday sun that shone viciously from a cruel blue sky. The battered old ute of many colours, the Warandas’ transport, stood underneath the crooked twisted tree. Once, there had been a chook yard under the trees too, but the chooks had all died or been eaten; now remained only a broken, rusted wire fence, a lopsided tin shed, where snakes and spiders lived, and a big, white heap of manure.
All so quiet in the middle of the day.
The children stood around, staring. In there: in that dark, dirty house lay Herbie. It was hard to realise that the boy who had been so well and truly alive only yesterday afternoon, was dead.
Suddenly, old Mrs Waranda was framed in the rotten, grey doorway. The children scattered like chaff in the wind and only the yellow dust from their feet remained. The dust and the boy.
He was big and strong and brown, the boy, but he looked small in the emptiness now all his friends had gone. He was almost six feet tall, with curly hair and hazel eyes, one of which was pulled down in a squint.
For a long moment, he and Mrs Waranda stared at each other, the boy with a shifty, guilty, perhaps embarrassed look; she with a sour, sad, beaten look. Suddenly the boy looked up and moved to the dogleg fence. It seemed the Aboriginal woman retreated a little into the house. The boy cried, ‘Hey, Missus Waranda, I got somphin’ for Herbie. For his grave, like, from us fellahs up home.’
For a bit Mrs Waranda hesitated, then the fat old woman moved down the wooden steps and waddled across the brown dust patch. She reached the boy and looked up at him with fear in her eyes— and with just the faintest trace of hate. Mrs Waranda had never hated anyone, really. She was too humble and afraid to hate the white kids who teased her, and the white men, who had put her oldest boy in jail on a false charge, and the white women who stared at her as though she was the filth of the nation. But I knew she hated the white kids who had killed her youngest son.
The boy reached into his bike basket and pulled out a bunch of wild flowers, wilting now from the sun, and pushed them into the scarred black hands. The boy mumbled, embarrassed now. ‘From me an’ Malcolm, Missus Waranda.’
The faintest trace of a smile flitted across the woman’s thick,
purple lips and she said, softness and tears in her big, brown eyes, ‘You a good boy, Davey Morne, you and ya little brother, Malcolm.’
And how I wish she could have been speaking the truth about me.
VIOLET CRUMBLE
THE lines of cars crawl along the ocean road. On one side glittering blue water leaps up in reflected-white peaks to catch the impassive blue sky: on the other, red and white brick-and-tile waves crash against the grey lost road that does not know where it is going, and does not care. On one side a vast living emptiness; on the other a vast crowded stagnant pool, swirling in the backwaters, with oil tanks and wheat silos, and railway lines standing out of the cesspool in dirty splendour, like rank ugly weeds.
One of the cars staggers out of the holy procession to the God that civilisation worships. It burps to a sleazy stop in front of the drab girl hitch-hiker crumpled like the thrown-away paper from a chocolate bar beside the road.
Where you going?
Oh—nowhere.
Well, hop in. It’s bloody cold tonight.
She is thin. Thin blonde hair, bleached white by the sun, thin red lips, thin fragile fingers, fiddling with her gaily coloured beach bag.
Thanks for the ride.
No worries. Watch out for my dog.
The boy is as young as the car is old. Apart from that, they are the same. Derelicts wandering nowhere, anywhere, any time. The dog is a mongrel pup, mostly collie—no special colour.
Eyes that don’t care any more glance over at the girl’s silhouette.
You have to be careful out here at night. Plenty of places for guys to drag you off into the bushes.
That’s funny.
Funny?
She does not look at him, only out the window. Occasionally street lights peer in at the two dropouts, lighting up the twilight world the pair have buried themselves in.
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