These Prophets travel around the world without any possessions or money, living off their Friends. I overheard Dad call one of the Prophets a tramp preacher. I guess you could call them that, but they always look sharp and own nice things, and stink of expensive city-folk aftershave, not like tramps at all.
Anyway, this Prophet and the family of Friends move right into our living room. The family look pretty uptight. They have one son and three daughters. The boy comes into my room. I tell him to fuck off. None of the daughters looks like a potential Becky Thatcher, so I pay no interest. The Prophet, Bruce the Elder, calls me boy and son and champ, takes a real interest in what I say about anything. I will have to put up with this phoney shit for the entire Easter holidays. Rain torrents out of the sky. The government sends in helicopters with supplies for the town. No trucks can cross the swollen rivers. Mum and Dad call every Prophet a Worker, for reasons I can’t comprehend. They don’t work at all, just preach the whole time about hell and damnation, say the government has fooled everyone because they have evil intentions. Bankers have the Devil whispering by their bedsides.
We crowd around the Prophet in the lounge room while the rain belts down and the wind tears at the roof and trees cascade against the sides of houses. He reads from the Holy Bible, then starts on about how we should thank the Lord for choosing us and blah blah blah when he stops mid-sentence and points at a school photograph of me on the wall above Mum’s piano:
—Except that one. He has the smile of Lucifer himself. He’ll need some extra attention.
My mother gasps in horror. All eyes turn on me.
Later, sitting atop the garden shed with JJ, smoking a St Moritz, sipping rum, I see Bruce the tramp preacher sneak past in the shadows of the house and peek through the window, at the boy of the visiting family of Friends in the shower. JJ’s sneaker squeaks on the tin of the roof and Bruce looks up. At that same moment the donkey Santa brought for Jaz at Christmas snorts and kicks in her pen. Startled, because he didn’t see the donkey huddled up under the tarp that Dad had slung over a tree to give her some shelter from the rain, the tramp preacher scuttles back to the house.
4
I accompany Dad to a cattle station. A horse has sunk to her neck in a dehydrated dam. We go to see if we can help drag her out. Since that monsoon at Easter and all through the summer not a mist of rain has cooled the dust. We arrive and see the farmer already out in the mud, stroking the horse’s head. Thrashing wild thing. She has wide eyes, sensing her doom. Sinking deeper, she snorts. When the farmer sees the police Land Rover come over the ridge of the dam, he stops and sloops towards us, knee deep. Green cracked clay on the edges of the dam lifts out towards the baking sun like a set of smashed dinner plates. The whole place smells like the inside of a fish tank when you clean it out.
The farmer and Dad tie a rope around the horse’s neck to the tow bar of the four by four, but we can’t get any traction in the broken clay on the banks of the dam. Raptors like question marks in rusted ironbark spires. The farmer squelches back out, puts the barrel of a .22 to the white diamond on the horse’s forehead, pulls the trigger. Blood arcs a metre in the air, nostrils flare, final breath taken.
—’Bout a dozen more next dam over, mumbles the farmer.
——
All the cattle stations out here have names. Scattered along the Burdekin River you’ll find Ups and Downs, Greenvale Station and Lucky Downs. Further north-east, above Mount Dora, you’ll find The Valley of Lagoons. North-west of Greenvale, out by Mount Esk, Conjuboy Station.
Dad takes the whole family to the slaughterhouse at Lucky Downs, to help out and share in the spoils. Lucky Downs has its own butcher shop. They prepare cuts and make sausages to sell to the town-folk. I’d describe it more as a slaughter shed on a little hill in a bone yard full of crows. Stone and wood, a corrugated-iron roof, concrete floors with half-pipe drains, and a little crane with a hook to hoist the beast. A farmer named Henry climbs the rails and stares down at a forlorn-looking cow. I scramble up beside Henry. The cow looks up at me; it moos helplessly as Henry takes aim with a bolt-gun.
—Senses its death, he drawls as he fires. The bolt hits the cow, centre of her head, and she drops to the floor. Henry scrambles back down, emerges on the other side of the pen with a cable in hand. He kicks the cow onto her back and grabs both of her hind legs, sticks the hook through the shins above the hoofs and yells out:
—Hit it!
A generator starts, the cable tightens and the beast in a river of her own blood floats out into the dressing room. They crank her up into the rafters, head down. Henry cuts her exposed throat. A frothy waterfall of blood pours out of the cow, pools on the concave concrete floor and runs into the half-pipe drains.
—Kids, get the buckets, get outside and get that blood down to the pit! Henry shouts at us.
We rush outside to a pile of ten-litre buckets and fill them with blood sluicing from the pipes sticking out of the wall. We pick our way among the bones of the thousand dead, shooing away the crows that scream at us, eyes, beaks and talons flashing. At the bottom of the little hill by a creepy pandanus tree and a rotten wooden fence we pour the blood into a deep trench. Black feathers float in the congealed mess. We race up the hill again, skipping over skulls glinting in the sun.
Driving around farms. Killing animals. Dad keeps me busy like this all through the day. Also, because he knows of my nocturnal activities, he takes me out at night shooting rabbits. We get home way after midnight and he has me up again in the dawn, helping fight bush fires or attending the scenes of car accidents or pulling marijuana plants from the bank of Redbank Creek.
——
Timothy’s family tree has roots deep in these parts, since the 1880s droving days. We visit Timothy and his parents out on their cattle station, where I encounter a kid named Albatross. I’ve seen him around school. He attends sometimes, but the Aboriginal kids stick to themselves. Albatross’s dad works as a ringer. He lives on the station. Albatross sits up in the rafters of the old sawmill, sneaking a cigarette, his gangly legs tucked up, bushy head hunched over like a skinny owl. I look for ant lions, little grey creatures that burrow down into the sawdust. They leave a dent where they tunnel in. I sit in the creaking shade of the shed, filling a jar with powdered wood, looking for an ant lion to trap. A voice comes from above:
—I saw your dad kissing Timbo’s mum in the orchard.
I hide my fright and answer:
—Bullshit! Where?
I don’t believe him. Albatross jumps down from the rafters into the sawdust. He leads me into the orchard and shows me the tree he sat in while he watched them kiss. Timothy says Albatross likes to spin yarns about the adults. I don’t let on I know this. We climb and sit among the boughs and eat mandarins and tamarinds. Albatross lives among the trees of the orchard in a huge tin shed with an old bus parked up the side. His family sleep in the bus and hang out in the shed the rest of the time. The shed has loads of busted old comfy sofas with wobbly split-open arms and a huge antique table covered in beer cans and rum bottles. Everyone calls him Trossy for short.
—Your parents swing, Trossy says, drooling from the sour of a tamarind.
—What do you mean, swing? I say, wiping my eye from a squirting rind.
—Crispin, he says, meaning his older brother who’s moved away to boarding school: Crispin told me most adults swing these days, at parties and stuff.
—They do have parties sometimes, I say, pondering this. I’ve seen melon balls, cheese platters, fondue and coffee liqueurs. Never seen a swing, though.
——
Trossy’s Uncle Parky lives in an old bus too, way out in the bush on the banks of a huge cold river that flows out of the volcanic limestone mountains. The swimming hole up at Green River has a terrific swing. You get up so high you forget to let go sometimes. Uncle Parky comes into town to buy supplies and he always visits my dad. He looks ni
ne thousand years old and stands about that many feet tall. When he smiles, he radiates wisdom. You can’t help but listen to what he has to say, about anything. Because of the circumstances in which he entered the world, no one knows his age. Parky has the longest feet I’ve ever seen; his toes gnarl up and point in different directions. Dad said Parky has never worn shoes his entire life and broke all his toes kicking saplings on horseback in the dark. Everyone calls him Uncle Parky, though only Albatross can claim that fact.
Today Parky comes into the police station bending through an entrance no one uses. He huffs under a load of groceries, his Akubra beaten and filthy, the band on it not a sweatband but a band of sweat, a black cockatoo feather punched through the felt. He catches me at my dad’s cop-desk, my hand in the petty cash box. Parky shouts out to my dad, laughs at me stuffing everything back into the drawer. He lets me think I’ve got away with it, then dobs on me.
Dad goes on about the hell I cause for the family, the trouble at school. Parky tut-tuts through his giant grey beard and looks at me out of his one good eye. I’ve heard the story a few times. When Parky’s tribe chose him as witch doctor, they burned out one of his eyes with a red-hot stick, so he could navigate the dreaming. Way back in the droving days, Parky’s tribe caught wind of the approaching cowboys who’d struck north from Charters Towers to claim land along the Burdekin River. For reasons unknown they stuffed Parky in a hollow log and disappeared into the bush. One of the cowboys, Timothy’s grandfather, found Parky and waited with him by the log for three days. Parky’s tribe didn’t return, so he adopted him. Dad told me Parky looked about four when found by the cowboys way back in nineteen hundred and something.
Before you know it, my dad agrees I should accompany Parky and Albatross out to his bus on Green River. By doing so, I’ll for certain learn some discipline.
—Some bush tucker and a few lessons in life from Parky will do you good, boy, Dad laughs, slapping my back.
As we arrive at Parky’s bus house in the mountains by Green River, the sun slips beyond the horizon. I can’t see a damn thing. Uncle Parky and Albatross say they can both see clear as day. They reckon I suffer from white-man blindness. I say, on account of their black skin, if they close their mouths, I can’t see them at all. They consider this the funniest shit they’ve heard in years and deliberately melt into the darkness. I flail around in the moonless night like an idiot, tripping over logs and god knows what else.
Parky starts up a raging bonfire and goes walkabout. Albatross and I sit around smoking Noogoora burr. He says Noogoora burr holds a sacred place in Aboriginal witch-doctor ceremonies – Parky showed it to him. Albatross prepares it for smoking, boasting Parky has decided to teach him the ways of the Kuradji. We lounge around, puffing on the bitter stems. You have to toke it gently or risk burning the crap out of your lips. We marvel at the stars out here in the middle of nowhere, the Milky Way like a smashed windscreen on the road.
—What does Kuradji mean?
—It means clever man.
—Like a witch doctor?
—Parky doesn’t like white man’s words. You shouldn’t call him a witch!
A twig snaps and Uncle Parky materialises by the fire with a half-skinned goanna. I blush red as the embers.
—I don’t care if you call me a witch, little feller, but ya shouldn’t smoke the Noogoora burr. It’ll fuck with ya white-man mind.
Sleeping by the fire under the stars. Dreams of serpents and eagles and Uncle Parky. He walks on water and rides clouds around.
In the morning we eat cold goanna and drink billy tea. Parky has a smoke and then takes us boys up into a giant limestone gorge. He reckons it formed when lava exploded out of the mountain a billion years ago. As the lava cooled, it cracked open like the top of a cake in an oven. He points out a heap of caves, explains they guard the bones of his Kuradji ancestors. He shows us where to find fossils: perfect fern leaves and weird ancient fish skeletons frozen in limestone.
—Where we stand, boys, you won’t find older land anywhere on earth. Parky points to a crag in a long broken length of rock: That rock over there has an entire legend attached to it, the legend of the Kunia woman. The Kunia woman got herself captured, raped and killed by a lizard man. If you know how to look right, her legs jut up – see those rocky outcrops in the distance.
We gaze off into the distance awhile, small among the clamour of birds, the song of the river.
By and by, in the gorge with the deep green lagoon, with the best swing in the world, we break for lunch. Uncle Parky says to have a swim while he nicks off and hunts for some bush tucker. He disappears in the trees on the ridge, and Trossy and I strip down. We kick about, stir up a jewfish and some turtles from under a floating log. Taking turns, we try to touch the bottom, clearly visible, but far deeper than it looks. We drift on our backs, shouting up at the cliff above the lagoon, sending echoes down the limestone gorge. After a while we decide diving sounds like a good idea. We clamber up through the trees and make it to the edge. Albatross dives off, leaving me on the cliff. He floats down below, egging me on to jump; then, he freezes and turns whiter than me. The colour in his face drains away like spilled ink in a sink and he shouts something incomprehensible. Thrashes about, near drowning himself.
—What? I yell down to him.
—Yowie! he screams, pointing up at me.
—What?
—Fucken yowie. HELP!
I’ve read about the fight-or-flight mechanism in the reference-only section at the library; the fear in his voice triggers it. I turn on my heel, ready to punch and run. Behind me towers a ferociously ugly creature covered in thick orange hair. Clumps of mud, broken sticks and gore matt and snarl and hang off it like dags on a sheep. It has dull grey eyes, a flat pushed-up nose, and teeth like an English bulldog’s. It snorts and then roars. I vomit right in its face from the stench and terror. Projectile vomit, too – it hits the yowie right in the eyes. It roars again, louder. I run like a sinner to heaven and dive off the cliff. In mid-air, as I turn like a thrown cat to see if the thing follows, I see Trossy sprinting through the trees on the opposite bank, screams sending up flocks of birds.
——
Shadows stretch through limbs and over ridges. Parky appears with a skinned kangaroo. I holler down from the tree, tell him we saw a yowie and that Albatross ran off and hasn’t come back. Parky looks concerned. He turns in a circle, stops, listens a moment and strides off into the bush. Alone here I won’t sleep. I shat my pants when I vomited on the yowie, and my arse burns.
Right on the edge of night Parky returns, empty-handed. We huddle around the fire, waiting for Albatross. Parky gets mighty fidgety; he smokes cigarette after cigarette. A terror grows in me that Parky will disappear into the dark, leaving me as yowie prey. I will never feel comfortable in the bush again. Tugging at his grey nicotine-stained moustache, Parky says:
—White fellers don’t usually see the yowie. What did it look like, boy?
—Ugly! I inch closer to the fire.
—Did it say anything?
—Huh?
—Did it speak? He lights another smoke, stretches out his legs so the flames flicker on his calluses and broken toes.
—No, it roared at me and I piss-bolted.
—Someone has died. He coughs. The tone of Parky’s voice sticks a cold finger in my liver and I find myself trying to crawl onto his lap. He laughs, but not at me.
—The yowie comes to let us know someone in our family has passed. It doesn’t eat people.
—Passed?
—She sings in the songline now.
—Who sings?
—Albatross’s aunt. I think she passed over. The yowie came to tell him.
—What do you mean, songline? Passed over?
—She died, mate. Our people go to the songline on the other side, to sing with the ancestors.
One of the logs o
n the fire collapses into coals, sending up a shower of sparks, startling both of us. Parky rises to stoke the fire, then from the waterskin strapped to the front of his four-wheel drive he fills his billy. He slips out of the light; my heart races again.
—Where did you see it? he says, emerging again into the circle cast by the fire.
—On the cliff above the lagoon.
—The cold lagoon?
—Yeah.
—Ha! I’d worry more about the Rainbow Serpent who lives in the bottom of that pool!
—What!
—Big feller … ’bout three times the length of my bus.
5
The Wreckers loses a member. Ren has disappeared from school and the teachers say he’s moved away. We size up David to take his place. Sometimes David turns up at school and sits in his cowboy clothes at the back. He lives out on Greenvale Station, the first pastoral lease in these parts, from which the whole town derives its name. He and his two sisters attend the School of the Air. They do most of their classes over a two-way radio. He stands a good foot taller than us and – unlike us boys who never wear shoes – he wears boots, proper horse-riding boots with the tall heel to stick through stirrups. He always wears a chequered collared shirt with pearl clip-buttons, and jeans with a man’s belt done up to the last notch, because he looks skinny as a goanna. The extra length of his belt hangs to his knee. He has an Akubra hat and a cheeky-looking gleam in his eye.
I don’t know when my sister fell in love with him, but she stands there in the playground when he comes to school, stares at him with a dreamy look on her face, like a sated kitten curled up in belly fur. I know she fell in love because I heard her telling her pet donkey, Smudge. Jaz always talks to her donkey, mostly about how much she hates me for playing jokes on her all the time. My favourite trick never fails. I get up on the roof above the pen Dad built to keep Smudge in at night. Sooner or later Jaz comes out and starts chatting away. I call out Hey, Jaz! She looks up and I dump a bucket of ice water in her face.
Scoundrel Days Page 3