Red Dirt Country

by Fleur McDonald

‘It’s different now.’ Dave felt like he was stating the obvious. ‘It’s not yesterday anymore, it’s today and things have changed. A lot.’ He put down his beer can and stood up to get the shovel, so he could drag some coals out of the fire and start to cook something to eat.

  ‘Ha!’ Bob gave a laugh and got up again for another beer. ‘Yesterday was great! Today is boring and tomorrow is gonna be crap. All this occupational health and safety and political correctness is bullshit. Can’t take a shit without having to follow the guidelines.’ Bob walked unsteadily out into the darkness and Dave heard him unzipping his jeans and then the splash of urine on earth.

  Dave dropped his head into his hands. Please don’t ever let me end up a soak like him, he thought. Aloud he said, ‘How about I get some tea happening?’ Without waiting for an answer, he found the barbecue plate and put it alongside the fire. Digging the shovel into the glow of red, he dragged out coals and settled them near the fire. He placed the plate over the flames and gave it a bit of a scrub with some newspaper he’d packed for that exact purpose.

  ‘I’ll be right for tea, thanks,’ Bob said as he came back into the firelight. He held up the can he was holding. ‘Just going to sit here and have a few quiet beers and enjoy the night.’

  ‘You’d be better off having something to eat,’ Dave answered as he seasoned the plate with butter. ‘How about I cook it and you eat when you’re ready?’

  ‘Son, I’m telling you. I’m right. I don’t need tea.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’ Dave sat back down in the chair; he’d ask again when there were more coals.

  ‘Let me tell you about this one case I was on,’ Bob said, plopping down in the chair and stretching his feet towards the fire. ‘I was working over east in the stock squad and there were reports coming through of a company selling fodder to farmers. The last two years had been pretty dry and the hay surplus was just about exhausted. But this company supposedly had supplies on some of their farms, which they were selling. They’d invoice the farmers for a road train worth of hay and then it would never arrive.’

  Dave took a sip from his can and listened.

  Bob went on. ‘Took a while to track him down, because he was moving all over the country. Accessing his emails remotely and so on. The location of the farm was fictional, as was the hay.’

  ‘Pretty rough, taking advantage of farmers who are already having a hard time of it.’

  ‘Son, I could tell you stories that would make your hair curl.’ Bob stared into the fire and Dave could tell he was thinking about a case that must have consumed him.

  ‘What made you get into being a stockie?’ Dave asked suddenly.

  Bob was quiet for a while, lost in his thoughts, but when he answered he looked straight at Dave. ‘I wanted to be a copper so I could help people,’ he said. ‘I didn’t ever think I’d end up in the stock squad. I don’t come from a farming background or even have any links back to the land. One day my boss just said I was shifting over. They needed a good detective on a case that was causing the stockies some grief and I was the fella to help.’ He scratched his chin and let out a sigh. ‘I found I really loved the work—took me a while to learn the animal side of things, but I had a good mentor. Old Monty Ferguson. He was a legend in his own teacup. Pushing up daisies now, but …’ His voice faded to silence.

  Dave glanced over and saw sadness in his face. He let a few minutes pass before he formed his next question. ‘What did you like about it?’

  ‘The cockies and the lifestyle. Camping out, all that sort of stuff. The lack of rules.’

  Dave hid a grin as he interpreted that as: ‘I like the drinking.’ At least he was consistent. He glanced at his watch: 8 p.m. already. Bec should be fast asleep by now.

  ‘There’re always rules.’

  ‘There sure are, but like I said before, less out here.’

  Dave threw a steak onto the barbecue plate and was just about to add the second one when Bob said, ‘Not for me, son.’ He gave a half-grin. ‘Yeah, I knew what you were about to do.’

  Smiling, Dave turned back to his steak and watched it cook.

  ‘Stars are incredible out here, aren’t they?’ Bob said, looking up at the night sky.

  ‘Clearest I’ve seen them for a long time.’

  Bob didn’t answer; he kept looking at the stars and drinking his beer. He didn’t appear to be bothered by the silence between them.

  Dave wolfed his steak down when it was cooked, realising he was really hungry. At home they would’ve eaten by 7 p.m.

  ‘Well, it’s been a big day,’ he said. ‘I reckon I’m going to hit the hay. Another long drive tomorrow. What about you?’ He got up and rinsed his plate from the water tank in the back of vehicle and started to unroll his swag on the other side of the fire.

  ‘Nah, son. I’m happy here for a while.’

  Dave took his boots off and climbed in, fully dressed. From the side of the swag, he grabbed his boots and put them alongside him and pulled the canvas over his head, before zipping it up from the inside.

  From here he could still see the stars and flickering flames. Silence covered the land, except for a fox bark and the crackling of the fire.

  He heard Bob get up and throw another log on, then go around to the back of the car. Next minute Dave heard the creak of the camping chair as he sat down again, so Dave rolled over and peered through the netting to see what Bob was doing.

  What he saw was an old man with a haggard face, the firelight flitting across his features. He was sipping from the neck of a whiskey bottle, lost in memories Dave could only guess at.

  Chapter 11

  Dave still couldn’t believe the conversation he was having with Bob. They’d been about twenty minutes away from Boogarin when Dave’d said, ‘You were up early this morning. Thought you’d take a bit to get going.’ He was feeling under the weather himself. The recurring nightmare of Bulldust chasing him had woken Dave at 2.30 a.m. From there he’d tossed and turned as Melinda and Bec had crowded his thoughts, and his shoulder had ached enough for him to get up and find some painkillers.

  ‘Why’d you think that? Only need a dingo’s breakfast.’

  Dave glanced at him out of the corner of his eye. The white lines slipped by and they’d edged another couple of kilometres closer to Boogarin by the time Dave asked, ‘What’s a dingo’s breakfast?’

  ‘A scratch, a piss and a good look around. You young blokes sleep too much. There’s shit to be done, you know.’

  The sun had barely cast a glow from below the horizon when Dave had heard Bob up and stoking the fire. When he’d cleared his blurry eyes, he’d seen that Bob was dressed and putting the billy on the fire. How he’d done that after drinking as much as he had last night, Dave didn’t know.

  Piss fit was the only explanation. Bob was very, very piss fit.

  ‘I thought you might be a bit … under the weather,’ he said.

  Bob looked across the car at him. ‘Son, that’s just a normal day in the bush. There’s nothing wrong with having a beer—gets good conversations happening. Everyone relaxes when they’re having a drink. A lot of information comes when you’re sitting around the campfire with a beer in your hand.’

  Dave wanted to say, ‘Yeah, but there wasn’t anyone there to get information from,’ but he kept his mouth shut.

  ‘When you go to a country pub or to the saleyards or some place of the like, you’ve got to talk to people, but you have to listen too. You listen more than you talk. God gave you two ears and all that shit.

  ‘But it’s important in the line of work we do. I’ll say it again: a few beers loosens tongues.’ He held up a finger and wagged it at Dave. ‘Take what we’re about to do here. Often in conversations it’s the same as those sheep I showed you in the yards the other day. It’s not what you hear, but what you don’t hear.’

  Turning the steering wheel slightly to take a sharp corner, Dave wondered how, from his comments about being hungover this morning, Bob had turned the conversati
on to something completely different.

  ‘For example, if cattle stealing is such a big problem up here, how come we haven’t heard about it?’ Bob said.

  ‘We have,’ Dave said, glancing down to check the temperature gauge and fuel. ‘We had the phone call. That’s why we’re here.’

  ‘Ah, but it’s the first time. Normally, before we get a call there will be whispers. A conversation in a pub, in the yards. I haven’t heard anything of the like, son.’ He leaned back in his seat and stretched as far as the car would allow. ‘Think about this, Dave. If you meet a good chick in the pub one night, you know, one you might think is a keeper, you’re not going to try and get her knickers off that same night, are you? You might have to take her out a couple of times before you try to get her into bed. Same with the people we’re talking to—you might have to chew the fat for two hours before they open up and tell you anything. That’s why the beer is a good thing.’

  Finally, Dave saw what Bob was saying. A few beers and people were more likely to tell you something important. Well, he knew that, he’d just never thought about using it in policing. It also didn’t explain why Bob had drunk so much when there wasn’t anyone he needed to get to open up. The words ‘functioning alcoholic’ came to mind and he glanced at Bob again. Yeah, the telltale signs of facial bloat and broken capillaries were there. Dave hadn’t noticed them before.

  The town sign came into view and Dave switched his thoughts to the copper they were about to meet. ‘Do you know this Senior Sergeant Glenn King?’ he asked.

  Bob nodded. ‘Met him once or twice when I was here a few years ago. He’s been here a while so he’ll know the ins and outs of everything. You know, the spiderweb effect.’

  ‘Spiderweb?’

  ‘Who’s connected to who. Pretty hard when we go into an area and we don’t know how people are linked. We might be interviewing the woman that the landowner used to date and the relationship didn’t end well and we wouldn’t know.’ He turned in his seat and looked across at Dave. ‘Now listen to me, son. And listen carefully. For that very reason, you have to play everything close to your chest. Don’t give too much away to these country sergeants, because you don’t know the relationships between him and everyone else around. Everything you say will probably get repeated back over the bar or around a campfire.’ He gave a bit of a chuckle. ‘That’s handy when you want to plant a piece of information and use it to our benefit, but not at other times. That copper you nabbed in Queensland was a prime example.’

  Dave felt a trickle of apprehension run through him. For an old pisshead, Bob was dead on the money. He’d had no idea that Joe had been dirty, and if Dave hadn’t been undercover, he may well have asked him for help at some stage. And that would have set him up for a horrible fall.

  ‘Turn right here,’ Bob said, indicating a side street. ‘The cop shop is on the left at the end.’

  Dave flicked on the indicator and drove down the street until he saw the blue and white sign, with police highlighted by fluoro lights behind the writing. Pulling up, Dave put on the park brake.

  The station looked like the town of Boogarin: clean and well cared for. In this town the streets were tidy and the road verges were mowed. The houses were old fibro structures, and although everything was neat, the paint had faded from the sun and there was a coating of fine red dust over the buildings as well as on the leaves of the trees.

  Three caravans were lined up next to the tourist bureau, one had the door open and a couple were sitting outside with cups in their hands. Other than that, the street was empty.

  The door of the station opened and an older man, about Bob’s age, dressed in uniform, started down the steps, a welcoming smile on his face.

  ‘Bob, good to see you, you old bugger.’

  To Dave, the greeting sounded like he’d met Bob more than a couple of times. Or maybe that was the way of the north.

  ‘Good to see you, Glenn.’ Bob held out his hand and they shook. ‘Meet Dave. New bloke. He’s the one you’ve been talking to.’

  ‘Glad to have you here, Dave,’ Glenn said. ‘Come in, come in.’

  The station was a converted house, the same as the rest of the buildings on this street. It had been gutted and turned into a station with a front desk and a large open-plan office. Glenn ushered them in and shut the door. ‘Only one of me here, so if the phone rings I’ll have to go.’ He sat heavily in the chair behind the desk and a loud puff of air left the cushion. ‘It’ll be all around the place that you fellas are in town. Anyway, it’s good to have the professionals here.’ He indicated for them to sit.

  ‘What can you tell us?’ Bob asked and Dave took out his notebook, ready to jot the important information down so they could refer back to it later.

  Glenn went through what they already knew: cattle gone from Spinifex Downs, through Deep-Water Station.

  ‘Kit came and saw me a week or so ago. He was the one who reported the cattle movement through his place. He hasn’t been able to pinpoint any stock that has gone missing, but Kevin from Spinifex can—he’s missing a couple of hundred head.’ He leaned back in his chair and Dave could see he was gathering his thoughts.

  ‘Now, Kit has also reported that he’s found carcasses on the side of the road. They’ve been butchered and he said it looked like a professional job.’ He paused. ‘History has showed that it’s usually Aboriginal people getting a feed when it’s dry and the roos are too stringy to eat and they can’t find any goannas. Because of that, until recently, when Kit Redman became shire president, there’d always been a bit of bad blood between the white-owned stations and the Aboriginal people up here. So in times gone by relations between them both have been pretty tense. But it’s better than it has ever been, so to think that someone has started butchering cattle in the way the Aboriginal mob would is very odd. As is the duffing of cattle—we had that stamped out.

  ‘The other part of it is that some of the station owners around here are annoyed that the government props up the Aboriginal stations.’ He held his hands up in a ‘what can you do’ type gesture. ‘Of course, there’s nothing we can fix there, but if there are still blokes around who hold a grudge about that, we’ve got an issue that could flare out of control. To be honest, I didn’t think it was such a big thing anymore, but at the rodeo on the weekend there were a couple of blokes who got a bit hot under the collar. Had a crack at some of the young jackaroos from Spinifex Downs.’

  ‘What happened there?’ Bob asked.

  ‘Just a few hot words. Nothing physical. But certainly there were accusations of cattle stealing and then the government payments got brought into it. The thinking there is tax-payers’ money is being used in a bad way.’ He spread out a map on the desk and tapped at a spot. ‘Here’s Spinifex Downs.’

  Both men leaned in and Dave found Boogarin on the map before tracing the road to the station they would need to visit. It looked a good three hours’ drive from town.

  ‘Across here is Deep-Water.’ Glenn tapped another spot. ‘And the boundaries run around here.’ He traced a couple of lines with his fingers. ‘Paperbark Valley and Cassia Plains are on either side. I went there to chat to the owners; Dylan Jeffries owns Cassia and Ethan Schultz, Paperbark. They’re the two fellas that had the run in with the crew from Spinifex.

  ‘Good to know about that,’ Bob said. ‘Can we take this map?’

  ‘Sure.’ Glenn started to fold it up. ‘Look, young Kev, he’s trying to fix all the issues we’ve talked about today, and more. He’s a good lad, got the smarts. Went to agricultural college down south and hasn’t got the same prejudices the old men have got.’

  ‘But he didn’t report his cattle missing?’

  ‘No, and I understand why. The Elders have a mistrust of coppers. Again, bad history between old coppers and the Aboriginal people.’ He leaned back in his chair and linked his fingers behind his head. ‘Nope, the guy who made the report is Kit Redman. Used to be our shire president, like I said. In the chair for fifteen y
ears, so he was. And he’s very supportive of what Kevin is trying to do out on Spinifex Downs, as he is with all of the Aboriginal people.’

  ‘Did you go and have a look at the tracks? Get any pics?’

  Glenn nodded. ‘But by the time I got there, the tracks were aged. Wind and time had made them unusable.’ He opened a manila folder and took out three photos. Dave leaned forwards and picked one up, studying it closely.

  The Senior Sergeant was right. The tracks weren’t clear and precise; the wind had blown the tops off and they were really just worked-up dirt that could have been cattle or camel tracks.

  ‘However, it was obvious that someone had used the yards at Deep-Water—Kit said there hadn’t been cattle in those yards for well over twelve months. There was oil on the gates to make them open and slide better, and the grass was flattened.’

  Bob ran his fingers over his cheek, scratching as he arrived at his chin, and nodded. ‘Well, best we get out there and have a yarn.’

  ‘What? To Kit Redman’s?’ Dave asked in surprise. ‘Why not to Spinifex Downs? They’re the ones who had the cattle taken.’

  ‘Yep, that’s right. But I want to talk to the neighbours first. Get a feel for the land.’ He stood up. ‘Thanks for your time, Glenn. We’ll get on.’

  Chapter 12

  There were four utes at the yards as Bob and Dave drove into Deep-Water Station. A mob of cows and calves—all varying sizes and ages—were milling around, creating a cloud of dust that hovered above the yards. The air was still and the cloud hung there, covering everyone in the yards. The stockmen were wearing handkerchiefs over their faces, the women only distinguishable from the men by their body shape and the long hair that tumbled from underneath the large-brimmed hats.

  The calves had been drafted into a different pen and were standing at the fence bellowing loudly, looking through at their mothers who were eating hay, unconcerned about their babies, until their stomachs were full.

  The cattle were a mixture of white, red and black, and Dave could tell they weren’t a single breed, but a mash-up of many. Liquorice Allsorts, his grandfather would have said.