When Colts Ran

by Roger McDonald

  ‘Never met him,’ said Veronica.

  Afterwards Colts felt Veronica’s fingers firm on his elbow, steering him away from certain people, and planting him in front of others – not before he’d seen the card on that twist of bushland blooms: ‘Rusty’, just the one word inscribed.

  Everywhere Colts went the year after Buckler disappeared he saw the cars men left when they made a break in their lives. Trees grew through them or they were tipped on their sides, rolled over, wheel-less, hubs in the air, axles gaunt, burned clean, left bullet-riddled or painted with warnings. These men’s existences ended in boarding houses or in paupers’ graves without any memorial except for their vehicles not quite abandoned of feeling.

  Sylvie let it be known that she met other blokes. She attracted a distinct bunch, younger, who materialised around sunset at the takeaway counter of the Central Café before they wandered up to the Five Alls for a schooner. Colts she referred to as her desperation policy, not directly to him, but to a woman, who told a man, and the man got the dig in while asking Colts if he liked old coats. It hardly disturbed Colts’s feelings. She took pity on him sometimes, he allowed that, hooking her finger into his belt and giving it a friendly tug. She hated to be alone.

  ‘A last-lighter,’ Gilbert Dalrymple called Colts, seeing him ambling past Sylvie’s fence, hoping for seconds or some such humiliation of the sort slighted men laid upon themselves.

  Last-lighters were dumb buggers as defined by Dalrymple – those who squeezed into luck at the final moment of wishfulness, just as Dalrymple did at Mt Stony strip after a day’s supering, and the mist came in, and he was lucky to be alive, kissing the dirt.

  Acceptance was the times’ theme and Colts, a half-generation older than Dalrymple, who had film-star golden locks and various definitions of cool, caught the tail end of it – casting himself as an observer of other men’s ruin. Excepting Dalrymple was married, Colts felt a tinge of jealousy around him relating to Janelle.

  Dalrymple and Cud were friends. Dalrymple urged Cud to wake up to himself, that he had the best little woman in the world standing by in Janelle if he wanted her. Colts cringed hearing the words. It was from Dalrymple (not through the agency) that Colts learned that Cud had bought Wirra-ding, a district gem: it was a plain brick homestead on a gentle bend of the river with five hundred acres of lucerne flats and hilly country behind. Colts waited to hear what Janelle thought of Cud moving to the town, gracing its horse-talk with his name. Dalrymple seemed to know the answer, but held off supplying it. Anyway it was obvious. Janelle had never looked happier.

  Colts’s rivals lining up at Sylvie’s ramshackle cottage were on a bachelors’ honeymoon having glimpsed the solution to the problem that burnt others up – empty desire, nights of frustration, blank incomprehension, the pattern of blokes. Their hair was tied back in ponytails after the after-work shower. Their idea of elegance was the Indian shirt. They wore loose trousers, sandalled feet. They were wispy-bearded, sex-war veterans and used aromatic oils.

  They were all a bunch of miserable duds of the male persuasion, in the words of Janelle. ‘You’re not like them,’ she told Colts. So it was revealed to him through these words that he still had a chance with her. She was pleased that he’d given up the grog, taking it as a personal compliment, and asked him to drop his washing around. She seemed to know he was smitten, still, that her name rode above him like the moon in a cloud, never touching the physical elements except in this way of dealing with each other, through his dirty moleskins in a pile and his shyly affectionate readiness to help where he could. If Colts didn’t think about Cud and didn’t see him around, and if Janelle didn’t mention his name, then Colts was happy.

  Damon was now eighteen. Janelle, pretty in her flower-sprigged frock, bangles jangling up her arms – more like a sister than a mother to Damon – said he’d come a long way for a boy who tore the wings from flies, upset teapots and bit her friends’ fingers and thumbs. They’d gone on a picnic, to bare acres on Duck Creek; it almost seemed romantic until Damon appeared in neighbouring paddocks toting a .22 and shooting back dangerously in their direction.

  ‘He needs a tight rein,’ said Colts, holding on to his hat.

  ‘Cud will see to him,’ said Janelle, a statement that chilled Colts more than being shot at.

  After this Colts took long, apparently aimless, drives through the long summer evenings as if he hadn’t already spent more than half his life behind the wheel. The road towards Wirra-ding made him feel as if Janelle was imprisoned there but unwilling to be sprung from its stones. Dalrymple said he’d flown low over, and seen Cud out riding with her.

  Colts turned off at Duck Creek, going up into the hills at a right-angled intersection taken on impulse. He felt an unsourceable excitement, a mixture of hope and despair, but where it came from was all around him. A desperation landscape made the heart feel glad concurrently with dragging him down. Hills and gullies were moods and emotions to him, part of his inexpressible being. He told Alan Hooke he was looking for a place where a pool emerged under ferns and trout rose greedy to a fly rod. Hooke himself had such a place in the hills: The Bullock Run. Hooke went there and stood still. It wasn’t Colts’s style, he did not fish, and the creeks were all puddles of dry, but it was the feeling he was after, of ripples spreading, lapping banks of dragonfly hum and bee-sting. Nothing in Colts’s behaviour on his lone drives squared with his long years of quietly plugging along visiting farms for Hooke and buying and selling sheep and dispatching rams to the butcher and promoting new lines. On a whim he started breeding up a small flock, just enough to cover costs and enter a fleece in the local show. Taking an interest-only loan from the Banque Nationale de Paris, who were offering money to all-comers that year, he bought the Duck Creek acres but now wool bottomed and debt loomed.

  It was the outward and visible sign of disturbance, stupidity with money. Dalrymple’s father, Oliver, had owned the land in the 1960s and lost it through happy-hooligan spending sprees. He’d bought an Auster tail-dragger, presenting it to his son, stereo sets that wouldn’t fit in the lounge and an Indian Chief motorbike immaculately ducoed slime green.

  ‘Lower your landing gear,’ said Dalrymple. ‘Get a grip.’

  Colts hardly cared what he meant.

  Bare distances were revealed to Colts through the wooded gaps of the ranges as an unsealed road went through. They offered glimpses of wide-open space where all things could happen. Dunc Buckler was in Colts’s mind every time he steered round a bend and saw an old car chassis. Buckler’s Land Rover must have run into a wind-scoured gully and been covered, poor bastard, in one of those soil shifts where half the continent lifted in a roar and dumped itself on another. Buckler never stopped coming back, here was chassis after chassis after chassis of scrap metal looking lively, before Merrington and Sons dragged it away and crushed it in giant calipers.

  Up on the eastern rises of the Isabel hills, Colts found the rusting VW used by the cherry orchardist Wolfie Keuper. The Isabel Walls threw their teetering shadow on the pop-top.

  The seats were gone, the engine was gone, the window glass crazed milky white. Grass grew through rust holes. The VW had a metal frame jutting from the back with strips of tattered webbing made into a seat. It was a spotlighter’s perch and Colts instinctively jumped when he saw it. He’d seen Keuper spread-eagled on the beetling Walls in 1967, an ex-Nazi superman. Neglected cherry trees against a wall of gums stood like a man in camouflage greens with branches on his back. A ghost man of the Isabel persuasion, Wolfie had warned trespassers with shots and the mountain still had that feeling of sights aligned. It was how the migrant was seen patrolling during the four days cherries were in season come December, mad as a meat axe in his adopted homeland, although considered quite sane when revisiting the fatherland, from all accounts.

  As Colts mooched along he ate a handful of sour bird-pecked cherries and spat the seeds out the side w
indow. Of course, he remembered himself as a teenager, blocking, strutting, unapproachable in cast-off military tatters and spouting bits of talk memorised from Dunc Buckler rants. When Damon was thirteen or fourteen Colts had found him tormenting a sparrow with a stick, and when he objected the boy skewered the sparrow dead. ‘Happy now?’ It went on from there. ‘Kingsley Colts, king shit,’ said Damon when Colts had advice for him. Damon’s crowing intelligence wiped the teaching staff of Isabel Intermediate High out of the reckoning when it came to useful knowledge. What Damon didn’t know he could work out, or learn in ten minutes, hunched over a book while tapping his foot and darting around glances like a trapped foe. Colts heard Cud had put him on a horse and Damon looked for the throttle, a phrase offending to horsemen. Maybe the reason for Janelle getting together with Cud wasn’t working, but Colts heard that Janelle was happy.

  A band of men peaking with male thirst at the Five Alls claimed the non-drinking Colts as their accomplice as they nursed a nightcap (or three) when the blinds were drawn after ten in the saloon bar, and the coppers up the road turned a blind eye. Colts polished a bar stool or stepped behind the bar as a publican’s favour, pulling beers. Just now and then, when Dalrymple came in, he allowed himself an Islay malt and a dash of tankwater – it had to be late.

  Colts was skilled at interpreting what men told him in his line of work. This ram over that ewe. That wool beribboned over this. Prices, margins, futures, stockpiling, marketing. They were more than farm economics to the one who listened. They were the poetry of blokes in pursuit of souls twisted from ideal shapes never entirely lost under the hammer of the seasons. Alan Hooke said that only a sheep man could have such quiet, disconcerting wisdom, born of work in the yards that could only be called self-effacing compared with the galloping, loud manners of cattle men with their burst facial blood vessels from bug-eyed confrontations with horned bellowers.

  A long-term game with Colts was whipping Randolph into impotent fury by adopting wayward enthusiasms Randolph couldn’t relate to at all. Unusually for a sheep man Colts was the original bull terrier breeder on the Isabel. He’d borrowed the sire, Grabber, from Buckler.

  There was a reason for this passing along of breeds: friendship. Colts felt for Alan Hooke, whose home acreage on the eastern edge of the Junction was besieged by town dogs allowed to stray. Hooke needed an animal more threatening than most in order to bail up owners and their dogs at the same time, to convincingly bellow he’d tear their bloody throats out if they didn’t use a chain and protect his rams and Christmas pigs.

  Colts bred from Grabber and gave Hooke the best of the litters – coincidentally when Hooke’s first marriage, to that wild girl, Barbara, was breaking up, starting lone man with biter as a motif on the Isabel from the day Hooke walked home along the crown of the road and single mothers wished him good huntin’ as they took bets on how long he would last without a woman in the house (not long).

  Colts and Hooke liked getting into barking fights with clients, which agents needed to show they weren’t creatures without self-respect, then turning around and swapping conspirators’ grins while their dogs pawed each other and slobbered out by the fertiliser sacks and hay bales where their water dishes were.

  Papa was the name of a dog Colts gave to Wolfie Keuper some years back. Low slung with muscular shoulders and a barrel-shaped body supported by wide, stumpy legs, every move Papa made parodied sexuality without any need for an opposite sex. Just material to plunge into would do, crouching over a trembling quarry with rheumy-eyed functionalism, planting seed in flesh and burying fangs in a pumping aorta.

  The sole of Wolfie’s shoe came away from the uppers flippety- flap as he nurtured his anger through the final burn-out. Papa was in a steel mesh yard at the back, servicing a bitch Melody, whose pups Wolfie gave to men with the same idea as his, which was to make a statement with their lives for once and for good and bloody all. The inheritance of Dunc Buckler via Colts spread into places Buckler never considered and a gone man stayed around barking.

  That old VW still startled Colts every time he came around the corner. Its de-glassed headlamps caught the sun and bounced it away to wherever the next car wreck waited to pass it along. Wolfie left a perceptible trail, departing the district on a pushbike, muttering imprecations. It was some years since he was last sighted rootling about in a tidy bin, outside a doughnut shop in the city.

  Yet even after all this time the VW looked as if a thumb on the starter and a foot on the gas would make it leap alive. Colts had the impulse to give it a try – why not, a man named Percy Perceval did so with a wrecked passenger bus and it fired. Percy marked the end of a succession of derro characters on Colts’s list of callers, a merry, prattling man who made something positive and somehow musical out of the rhythms of a careless life.

  That rainbow-painted twenty-eight-seater had come out along Perceval’s road, slithered to the verges abandoned, and he got it going again, driving farther along the track, up through the peppermint forests on the southern slopes, through a cleft in the mountainside and into a clearing high above the coastal ranges that were wild as the Owen Stanleys, where Colts had posed with an Owen gun at nineteen for a photograph that he sent to Randolph, and Randolph had glued in his album where it still was.

  Smoke drifted through a clearing at ground level, creating skeins of diaphanous grey. It reached into Colts’s throat and tightened his bronchus. Percy Perceval was a charcoal burner. It seemed improbable when the old crafts were all gone. Somebody came and carted the sacks away to the city, where they were used in charcoal chicken shops. The wood ovens were dinosaur carapaces, curved sheets of iron set into the ground, smouldering. Percy worked hard at turning beautiful logs into chunks of pitch-darkness, retaining their beauty in whorls of grain and pressure elbows like photographic negatives. Of all the roads Colts took Veronica down in her old age, this one most attracted her.

  On the trackside she collected finger-sized sticks of charcoal that she used for drawing on lavish spreads of paper. It was a country of wounded trees up there along the escarpment where Colts drove that woman, taking in the light.

  The eucalypts had the colourings of salves and greases – rust, verdigris, zinc. Eucalyptus rossii was silver frosted, with light lifting the colour tones. Flushes of red, bunches of black, trunks pillaring from the shaly ground. Veronica pointed them out, showing Colts how to look closer, always closer without her explanations annoying him, as they had as a boy. So he looked. Possibly for the first time deeply. And she was gratified. She still had him, this man of carapaces who never wanted her to visit his house in Woodbox Gully.

  *

  Talk of men over the bartop the one night per week when Colts came in and worked for a few dollars was incessant with his friend Dalrymple, whose crop dusting was built on men’s dreams more than most, on Dalrymple himself shedding the bonds of earth, serving graziers on the receiving end, men in love with fairy dust, i.e. superphosphate, raining down. In this respect old Oliver Dalrymple had been a dreamer only to a slighly more exaggerated extent than average, just to the level of being held in a straitjacket to quieten the worst of him with a hypodermic syringe.

  ‘All we are, are dreamers,’ said Dalrymple, as a kind of benediction over his old man, which Colts denied in his practical life. But now he was silent.

  ‘Men’s monologues are streams of photons spraying from personal spaceships spinning beyond the asteroid belt somewhere,’ said Dalrymple.

  ‘You’d know,’ Colts merely added.

  Dalrymple was a talker. Forget the rules of society, wisdom chapping his cheeks like slipstream, he watched from the Five Alls and the best he could say was that a hot meat pie with gravy, peas, mashed potato and sliced carrot served as bar food through the paint-chipped kitchen hatch, along with a whisky’s coppery shine, was the limit of the flame to which men owed existence.

  Besides which, the Five Alls had a pull taking
decisions out of a bloke’s hands. A certain slant of the bar, a drum of footsteps not yours on the outside verandah, you were bound to follow. It made blokes smirk in recognition of their fate. You didn’t have to live it to know it. Now whose old lady was this coming to give a bloke curry? It was Erica Molinari, Mrs Gilbert Dalrymple, coming into the bar as quietly and as softly as she was able, and after drinking a shandy taking the yammering Gil Dalrymple home.

  Colts went along the counter with a Chux Superwipe, making it gleam.

  Two men met at the Five Alls for the counter lunch every Friday, almost without fail. Colts came up from the agency and took his place at a dining table and someone brought their drinks. Their talk was gapped by long silences. Randolph never breasted the bar when he wanted another, as every other drinker did, but raised a finger for his fizzy gins (while Colts held to lemon squashes). Randolph was onto being a controlled drinker, having parted with AA. He maintained a fiction that the Five Alls was a hostelry with drink waiters, worthy of his high ideals. You could hear every word he said in the room. People listened.

  ‘I’ve been reading about courtesy titles. What do you know about them, Kings?’

  ‘Zilch. Nothing. Nought. Zero.’

  ‘Courtesy means manners of the court, civility, politeness, the refinement of the age. The courtesy title of the eldest son of a duke is marquis. Of a marquis is earl. Of an earl is viscount. Younger sons of dukes and marquises are styled lord followed by Christian name and surname.’