by Greg McLean
Lying in bed, staring at the damp walls of the dormitory with his face pulsing with dulled pain, he thinks of Jock and his doting dog across in the nearest building. Imagines he can hear him even now feeding it stolen kangaroo from the kitchen. The sound like slurping sex. Like his parents in their bedroom.
And when the homestead is stilled, Opey dead to the world across the room, he rises. He steals into the hot night and stands outside the other dormitory in the darkness, listening for those disgusting sounds. Letting the anger he’s been trying to stamp down all this time finally rise.
There’s a commotion outside the next morning when he and Opey step out for the day’s work. Mick follows the other jackaroo to the homestead, hopping as he shrugs on his boots. Jock’s standing in the doorway of the meatshed, pale-eyed and hysterical, yelling at Cutter. ‘Where’s me fucken dog?’ he’s wailing, but Cutter just looks back heavy-lidded.
‘Got no proof, Jock,’ Cunningham says standing between them.
‘What’s that then?’ He points at the fresh pool of blood on the floor of the shed. ‘He killed my dog like he said he would!’
‘Bullshit,’ Cutter says. ‘I’da hung it up if I did.’
‘You see!’ Jock says. ‘The psycho threatened me dog. And now she’s dead.’
‘That was me,’ Mick says, and everyone looks at him. He points at the blood. ‘I killed a wether last night. Cut it up for stew.’
There’s a pause as Jock stares at the upstart jackaroo, and the others exchange glances before Cunningham tries to cool the temperature. ‘Maybe your dog’s run off. We’ll look for it today when we’re mustering the —’
The rabbiter throws off his hand. ‘It was one of them. I know it.’ His wild eyes flit between Mick and Cutter. ‘Motherfuckers.’
The overseer’s getting angry now. ‘I’ve had enough of this. You accuse a man you better have proof. And you got none. So leave it. Your stupid fucken dog’s gone walkabout. End of story.’
‘Why would I do it?’ Mick asks. ‘I loved that dog as much as you, Jocky.’
Jock snarls. ‘You mongrel.’ But he can’t get through the tangle of men between them, and he can’t divide his fury between Mick and Cunningham. His anger drains away and he stands hollow and beaten.
‘We’ll find your flamin’ dog,’ Cunningham says. ‘Rest of us have work to do. You two,’ he points at Mick and Opey, ‘supposed to be in the Grafton paddock. Get a goddamn toe on.’
As Cutter walks back to his hut he gives a sidelong knowing look at Mick, but Mick doesn’t return the gaze. He waits for everyone to break apart then leans in to Jock as he passes. ‘Have a good feed tonight, Jocky. Take your mind off it.’ He leaves the rabbiter staring vacantly at him in the dawn silence.
On their horses later, Opey pulls alongside. ‘Did you do it, Mick?’ he asks quietly.
‘Cutter’s the one threatened his dog, not me.’
‘That’s not what I asked.’
‘Think I’d do something that fun without inviting you along, Ope?’
‘It was funny to see the look on his face. The prick.’ Then he frowns. ‘I hope the dog’s okay, though. I got nothing against it.’
‘Course not. We love animals, right? Now lets go fatten some sheep for slaughter.’
Opey soon forgets his worries and they work into the evening.
Jock doesn’t eat that night but sits quietly on the other table in the mess hall. Nor does he look around at the jackaroos with that smartarse grin like he did most dinners.
When Mick goes to bed he softly sings that same tuneless melody of death at the damp wall and smiles.
Puts him right to sleep.
In his dreams, Mick imagined he was sitting at the head of the table and his sister was making them roast dinner, and there were no scary hacksaws and knives and farm equipment on the walls because he’d taken them down when their parents left. And they’d sat together smiling and eating their dinner and her face was whole again.
He could still imagine himself sitting there when he woke to the moon beaming high and yellow outside his window. Then he turned to the sound that had woken him: his father standing silhouetted in the doorway.
‘C’mon, boy.’ His voice deep with night-phlegm. Then he was gone and there was just the bright of the hall light.
Mick lay there, breath misting above the covers. It took a moment for his brain to thaw, then he scooted out of bed before the shadow could return. The floor was icy as he threw on his nearest clothes and padded out to the kitchen. His father’s scalp peered through thinning, unwashed hair as he bent tying his hunting boots, veins popping in his weathered hands. Mick could smell the familiar sweat of Scotch from his skin. From the other room came the sound of his mother’s drunken snoring.
He waited by the table, blinking sleep, until his father creaked to his feet and opened the gun cabinet by the fridge. But he didn’t take out the .243 dogging rifle. Instead, he hefted the shotgun and a rattling box of shells and headed out into the dark with only a nod of his head, the heavy steel barrel cradled against his shoulder like a child.
Mick hesitated only a moment before following. The cold bit their faces as his father strode ahead to the car. Above, the stars spread in a glittering mass.
‘Don’t we need the traps?’ Mick asked, waiting as his father sat and slid the gun behind the seats. The man gave an impatient shake of the head. Sat without word.
He hadn’t driven with his father since the dingo and her pups and he wondered why he was being taken now. What his father knew. But in the man’s face there was no argument and he hoisted himself up into the cabin.
Mick jerked in his seat as they reversed out onto the road. Then his father surprised him again by not heading for the one-lane bitumen south to Barraldyne, but instead turning north towards the desert. As they passed the Stevens’ next door – the only other property on this side of town – the boy peered out at the dogs barking beneath the gap of their run. Their yapping fell behind and he saw himself reflected in the inside of the window: hair scarecrow-like beneath his beanie, eyes wide and wondering. Then the car bucked as they left the paved road behind and hit the dirt tracks, and the lights of the town faded with the dogs.
He glanced at his father hunched over the wheel, his face cragged in the glow of the dashboard. His eyes red-rimmed and glassy. Mick knew better than to ask any more stupid questions, but he couldn’t help glancing at the shotgun behind. Had to force himself to turn back to the road and look for suicidal roos.
The road rose up in the headlights like a dream. He stared at the few feet of dirt being eaten by their wheels and his eyes became heavy, but he didn’t let himself fall asleep. He was too terrified for that. He could feel the weight of the gun behind him as if it was sitting on his shoulders.
They turned onto another track and continued for an hour or so while his father checked the turnoffs. Mick curled up on his seat, chilled and scared to the bone, wishing the heater worked. Then they saw the lights of a town in the distance – and it could be Roma, Rockhampton, Brisbane for all he knew – and his father’s car crept along its outskirts. Mick flinched as his father turned to him, expecting them to pull over on the lonely road at any minute, and then they’d walk out to some small clearing like with the dingo and her pups, and then . . . what? What did he think his father would do?
Instead, the man laid a gentle hand on him. ‘You can never tell anyone about this. Bush justice. Any man’d understand.’
‘What?’ Mick asked, small.
‘I found him,’ his father said softly and cut the lights. They cruised slowly down the track to a small house rising against the sky ahead and Mick gripped the seat beneath him. Then his father killed the engine too and they rolled in quiet to the house. Mick sat rigid as his father grabbed the gun and slipped out. When he turned back, all Mick could see was the white flare of his eyes: ‘Come on.’ Mick stepped out into the cold and ran behind his father, soft in the dirt. His eyes quickly adjusted to the moonlight and he saw the no
se of a car stuck out of the carport and Mick’s heart leapt into his throat at the memory of the black car, remembered it eating up the road as it came up behind them. His father watched him, gave a quick nod, then turned to the flywire door at the side of the house.
They crept silently inside, the house quiet and sighing around them. Mick felt strange being in another person’s house at night like this. Everything looked huge and dark in the dull moonlight oozing through the windows: the old grandfather clock, the portrait of a staring family on the wall, the big squat television in the corner of the living room, the fridge wheezing to itself in the kitchen. He’d never been anywhere he wasn’t invited.
They could hear snoring and his father headed for the back bedrooms without looking at Mick, trusting him to keep close by his side. Mick stole a glance back at the gaping side door, wondering if he should just turn and run out into the night. But where would he go? His father was a tracker. He’d be able to find him before he’d gone two miles. That’s why he’d never run away from home all those times he’d wanted to – because he knew his father would catch him if he did and he’d maybe end up like the dingoes. He followed.
His father stalked whisper-quiet down the hallway and pushed open the bedroom door and slipped through the gap. Mick stayed back, hoping he wouldn’t have to see what happened in there. He couldn’t remember when he’d last taken a breath.
A muffled grunt sounded, then wood clubbed bone. Mick waited, turning blue. He jumped a step back as the door pushed open and a struggling figure stumbled out.
The man was naked: fat and white in the darkness. A black streak of blood ran down his ear and dripped onto his shoulder. Fear wild in his eyes. When he saw Mick, it seemed to make him more scared and he began to turn back to the man with the gun. Mick’s father brought both barrels up to his head and the man froze, his penis like a little snail pulling back into his body. Mick had to look away.
‘Walk, cunt,’ his father said and the man stumbled past, looking down at Mick with confusion on his face.
The night air hit them as they stepped outside and Mick could see goosebumps all over the man’s glowing body as he crunched towards the car, shivering.
‘Wait,’ his father said, and as an afterthought locked the side door of the house behind them, then gestured the man to keep going. ‘In the tray.’ He motioned with the gun and the man stepped onto the back of the ute. The suspension sagged with his weight. ‘Lie down. On your face.’ Mick’s father tied the man’s hands behind him, quickly, before the man could think about running, and looped the other end around the eyehooks along the tray edge. He gagged the bloke, then got out. ‘Gonna be bumpy.’ He smiled coldly down at the man then headed around to the driver’s side. ‘Get in, boy.’
Mick crept onto the seat next to his father, terrified. ‘Dad?’ he started to say softly as they sat there in the darkness, his father with both hands on the wheel staring straight ahead, fingers sinking into the plastic.
The man looked down at him and there was no coming back in those eyes. He nodded. ‘Yes, boy.’ Mick had no question and his father didn’t seem to have expected one. His old man started the engine and they pulled away, lights still off, and headed bush.
Mick could hear the heavy body of the man as they hit bumps, then when his father flicked the lights back on he went faster still, speeding up as a rut appeared ahead. The man’s whimpering could be heard above the engine, even through the gag. Mick held his ears.
They finally pulled up beside a copse of trees and Mick’s father trained the headlights ahead then hopped out. The man had pissed himself, the dark yellow liquid rolling around the grooved metal of the tray in the moonlight. There were tears in his eyes and Mick could see angry bruises already forming on his pale limbs. His father undid the ropes then stood back, gun raised. The man was too battered to try running and he slid through his piss off the tray and slowly onto the ground.
Though Mick was scared, fearing what his father intended to do, there was something in the naked man’s eyes that fascinated him. Before he had seen confusion in them but also a clinging to life, a desperate search for answers and escape. Now, out in the cold dead of night with the bright moon and vast uncaring stars above – no other soul for miles around – something had gone from his stare. He kept looking at the gun, then away, vacantly, out over the land. And Mick felt the power his father wielded.
The man stood there, knees knocked together, hands still tied behind his back, and did nothing as his father removed the gag. ‘On yer fucken knees.’
‘I dinnit do nothin’,’ the man sniffled. But he kneeled.
‘You know exactly what. Now you’re gonna pay for what you did to her.’ Mick’s father choked saying that.
‘But I never been with a woman,’ the man said, still staring off into the night, tears down his cheek.
‘She wasn’t a woman, you sick pervert! She was a little kid.’ Then his father turned to Mick. ‘This is him, isn’t it? Told you I found the fucker.’
The man turned his head to Mick and recognition dawned. ‘I gave you chocolate,’ he said softly. ‘Kids like chocolate. I just wanted to be nice.’
‘Knew I was right. When I asked around, your name kept coming up. Bloke living by hisself, edge of town, just a few hours away. Spoke slow, so’s why my son thought you was a foreigner. Reckon you have a thing for kids. Always try talking to them, giving ’em things. Then you went too fucken far, right?’
‘The police said that too. I just like kids. They’re not cruel to me like everyone else is. They like me car. I was only trying to give your kids a lift. Trying to help.’ The man looked to Mick and the boy took a step back out of the headlights’ beams. ‘You remember,’ the man said in his direction. ‘You said you were going home to lunch. And I said, okay, but have some chocolate. For after, so your mum wasn’t mad. But you wouldn’t take it. Like a coupla angels walking in the heat. Musta been hot. So I left the packets there. Come home in time for work. They don’t like it when I’m late for work.’
‘Yer a fucken liar!’ Mick’s father shouted. ‘You’re not going to trial, sitting in that courtroom day after day smiling at the cameras, getting fed three meals a day till you die old. This is yer trial right here.’ He clubbed the man to the temple.
The man rocked but kept his balance. More blood trickled as he looked across at Mick. ‘I wanted her to take . . . the chocolate. But you said no. So I watched her . . . all the way in my rear-view. She was still okay.’
‘Shut up,’ Mick hissed.
But his father wasn’t listening. He hit the man again, harder, and broke two teeth. The man spat them out white into the dirt. Nearly fell. He was crying hard now. ‘I didn’t do nothing. She was so beautiful. So happy. I had a sister like that once. She died with my father and mother . . . in the car. When I got hurt. Then I bought my new car . . . to make up for it.’
‘Look at me,’ Mick’s father said.
The smell of shit was now thick in the air as it ran down the inside of the man’s legs. ‘They buried them. And now I’m alone. And no one ever comes to see me. Except you.’
‘I said look at me.’
The man’s eyes instead on Mick: ‘Please. You know what happ—’ His father stepped in and the boom cracked the sky and Mick nearly jumped out of his skin. One moment the man was kneeling upright against the horizon, his body wavering in the headlights. Then his head billowed back in a dark mist and those pleading eyes and the top of his skull disappeared into the night, and he dropped backwards like a felled tree and shuddered into the dirt. Blood spread from his head, a darker stain out from his arse, and somehow he pissed himself again: a little muscular arc from his hidden penis. It trickled to an end and then there was nothing.
Mick’s father scraped a hand over his grizzled chin, unsteady on his feet. He looked at Mick as if waking up. ‘Go sit in the car,’ he said, then rummaged in the tray for a grappling hook. Mick sat up in the cabin as his father snagged the man’s body and dragged
him around the back. The wheels sagged again as his old man hauled the weighty body into the back, and Mick sat listening to the thunks as his father used his hunting blades to cut up the carcass. He stared at the drag marks in the ground ahead, as the methodical work continued behind him, remembering the man kneeling there only moments before, talking, breathing, pleading. Then he closed his eyes, unable to look anymore. The sounds took forever to stop.
His father tossed the chunks of meat onto the ground then washed out the back of the tray with a jug of water – he’d do it more thoroughly when they returned home. He came back around, wiping his hands, and slid in silently. Starting the car up and chocking it into reverse, he backed them up a hundred yards.
They sat there looking at the circle of trees ahead as the dingoes crept into the edges of the headlights drawn by the smell of blood. They howled their eerie keen, waiting for the intruders to leave so they could scour the bones, but his father didn’t move. Mick could see his hands were shaking on the steering wheel.
‘I brought you tonight to show you what has to be done,’ his father said, and his voice was shaking too. ‘This world’s all pain, boy. I don’t set you right, it’s gonna destroy you. You got to be strong to survive. Or you die.’ He looked across at his son. ‘You don’t tell no one, ever. Got it?’
Mick flinched, expecting to be hit, for emphasis. He nodded quickly.
But his father had turned back. ‘We got him, baby,’ he said softly, staring at the gnashing dingoes on the edge of the light. ‘We got him.’
Then he crunched the car into gear and drove slowly back to the road. Mick sat quiet in his seat and stared out the window into the dull moonlit night. The stench of the dead man and of cordite still filled the car, but he tried to ignore it and let the dark outside enter him and fill him, as if it could wash away what happened.
But nothing can change what’s been, and as the smell of death seeped deep into his pores, stained him yet again, he remembered everything.
The branch cracked and he had thought: the man. He tried to move before the man could come after them, but his feet wouldn’t react.