When Colts Ran

by Roger McDonald

  ‘Get away with you.’

  ‘Similarly all daughters of dukes, marquises and earls are styled lady. Sons and daughters of viscounts and barons and younger sons of earls are styled the honourable. None of these titles carry the right to sit in the House of Lords.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  Of the two, Colts politely and patiently contributed nothing to the flow of talk and made no move to terminate the lunch until Randolph reached for his hat, paid, and it was time to go. Except that Colts said once a year, ‘It’s the season,’ and Randolph knew there’d be no lunch the following Friday, because of the reasons Colts found to go riding the fire trails downstream on the Isabel River, Tim wearing his cabbage-tree hat, cantering ahead on his seahorse-headed Prancer, waving Colts up on thundering Old Bill.

  Colts knew that Janelle would be along. Cud would not be.

  They loaded packhorses and rode to the top of the escarpment. To the east the Tasman Sea shone blue as ice. They could see rusty coastal ships and offshore reefs through pocket binoculars. Under their bootcaps were the serpentines of river after it spilled from the escarpment. It was a dream to plunge into, the lower reaches of that river flashing a signal as the sun passed over, home to eels, platypuses, wrens, red-bellied black snakes, kingfishers, goannas. Shallow widths of golden river, waterworn stones, groves of casuarina. They were the backdrop to Veronica Buckler’s childhood coastal home, the ramparts of her late-age canvases. Colts imagined he could see her tin roof gleaming.

  Tim Knox said it was the West that counted in the dreams of men, ‘Out where the bones of the dead men lie,’ and he gestured inland from the mountain top like the squatter in the engraving on the walls of Hooke & Hooke.

  ‘I felt that once,’ said Colts, seeing himself setting off in a wartime train, full of a boy’s longing and expectation. ‘Then it’s gone.’

  ‘Wake up again,’ said Tim.

  He wanted to go droving like Randolph had in wartime and never stopped talking about. He really would. Up to Alice Springs, across the Canning Stock Route, on into Kimberley gorges, romanced by red rock and pandanus groves. He would not be helpless like other blokes. He would actually do it. He would not be a spectator to male frustration, like Colts, he said. He’d take his wife and his kids with him.

  Colts raised, then lowered, his eyebrows. They were wiry with sprouts of grey tangled in black patches. Hairs sprouted from his ears and could be seen lurking up his nostrils. There was nobody in his life to tell him to get out the nose scissors.

  ‘Give up on Janelle,’ said Tim. ‘It’s stupid.’

  Northwest of Eureka Station in a cradle of red sandhills was a camp long-established in Colts’s mind. A swag, a collapsible table, an absence of society he remembered and a door – something like a door, at least, a star-framed passageway – which he, Colts, passed through at the age of eighteen as he left Oakeshott’s graveside the day of his burial and travelled to Adelaide where he enlisted in the army, his childhood finished in his head.

  Janelle sang to her horses. They were Cud’s horses.

  They camped at a pool. Wattle blossom floated on the water where swimmers broke through, slicked hair and bright eyes in the evening light, wrists and backs sending out ripples. There was a theme of alcohol lapping into play. A whiff of marijuana. The horses munched their nosebags in the shade, the riders drank whisky from a plastic flask and wine cooled in rapids while Colts busied himself turning damper off the camp fire and keeping coals restricted from getting away. Overhead, a scorching wind bent the treetops; red-bellied black snakes slithered the river stones; lace-patterned goannas clawed tree trunks and stared down from steady eyes; beetles and bugs burrowed into swags; cicada and mud-eye carapaces crunched underfoot. An electric-blue kingfisher left expanding rings of contact on the water. Life seemed a great endowment then.

  ‘Kings, I’ve got something to tell you. Last Friday. In Pullingsvale. Cud and I were married in the registry office. You should have seen Damon’s face, it glowed.’

  *

  A month later at the Jockey Club ball, Colts watched Janelle’s hair fly loose.

  ‘How are you?’

  He wasn’t drinking. It amazed him. He wasn’t drinking yet.

  ‘I’m good enough,’ he said.

  The feeling was a small boy’s numbness of incomprehension carried by a man with an acorn for a heart.

  ‘Your turn,’ she invited him onto the floor. She wore a black taffeta skirt that whipped against him as they danced. When the tempo of the music slowed he extended his hand for the moment to continue but Janelle only smiled and returned to where Cud held her drink. Colts had turned sixty he reminded himself – he ought to know better. But this was terrible. His hand trembled, he went outside and smoked and looked at the stars.

  Cud came out and tapped him on the shoulder with a coldie. ‘You look like a big wombat sitting there.’

  ‘Eats roots and leaves,’ Colts threw the rejoinder automatically and opened the can of Mountain Maid sparkling apple juice so thoughtfully selected by a woman’s husband, rapped the metal to his teeth and let it spill in. Janelle came out and took Colts’s arm, settling beside him. His stomach lurched at the sound of her bangles. He wondered why men were unable to count their blessings.

  Months later he passed Janelle on the road. She barely raised a finger in greeting from the cab of the six-wheeled horse transporter she drove, looking embattled, determined. Another day, she rode a cantankerous mare forty kilometres along the mountain-road verges, mastering its skittering and bolting. Colts heard about this from people he didn’t know. It was her business of matching her life to Cud’s while reports said Damon was in fist fights with him. Colts heard Janelle sang ‘Danny Boy’ as she rode. Where was Cud? Following behind in his ute, listening to country tapes, drinking cold cans, keeping his eye on her to be sure she was doing all right. They were lucky and it grieved Colts to say so.

  Colts was getting petrol one day when he saw an unusual vehicle half-shadowed in the workshop doorway of the service station. At first he thought he was looking at the back of a specially outfitted lorry. Then he saw it was engineless – a four-wheeled, horse-drawn wagonette. There, around the corner, tethered to verandah posts, were two draught horses and a seventeen-hand stockhorse known to Colts as a rider. A dog growled at Colts while he stared, knelt and offered his fingers to chew.

  The scene needed no interpretation. Tim Knox and his wife came swinging down the lane with their arms around each other.

  ‘It’s something we always planned to do together, drift across country like you and Randolph did when you were young,’ said Pepita. ‘Along the Darling, down from the Cooper.’

  ‘It was just Randolph,’ said Colts.

  ‘Was it?’ said Pepita. ‘He gives such a picture of you, Kings, you’re always in the camp.’

  ‘Now it’s our turn,’ said Tim.

  Pepita looked absorbingly at Tim. ‘Most men can’t face their own dreams without a push.’

  ‘Really,’ said Colts.

  ‘They say it’s quaint,’ said Tim, lifting his hat to a passer-by. Having much older brothers, one successfully dead, the other emotionally dead but financially and studwise alive, Tim chose the third way always. Defending the advantages of hay-burning propulsion, he made living on nothing seem a triumph inevitable as defeat.

  Randolph still owed them payments.

  ‘He’s your friend,’ Pepita said. ‘Your best friend.’

  ‘That’s a stretch,’ said Colts.

  Word was that Randolph would do anything for Colts if Colts asked him, but there had to be the question.

  ‘You go round getting money out of people for Hooke. Can’t you do something about Randolph? We’re skint.’

  ‘I’m skint,’ said Colts.

  ‘But you’re on your own,’ said Pepita. ‘You don’
t have family expenses. You’ve always kept to yourself. You are lucky as tumbleweed, living from a suitcase, driving a company car. You have the luxury of the single life, you don’t realise how everything multiplies, not two by two but by some sort of weird algebra as a family grows – where there’s a tap in your bank account and it all gets siphoned out.’

  Colts reeled back at this summary, questioning his right to a life of his own.

  Before heading west, Tim took the wagon for a test run through the Junction with the kids waving to their friends out the back. The draught horses stamped and snuffled, their hairy pasterns sweeping the bitumen surface of the road. Pepita, wiping her eyes with the corner of an apron, stood on the running board suppressing her pride. Love was the window to the soul. Only sometimes the shutters came down, the blinds were drawn, the lamps extinguished and the rheumy whiteness of a blind man’s eyeballs common currency. Janelle presented them with a Spangled Hamburg layer. The hen must have come from Wirra-ding as Janelle had no chooks of her own. Tim tied its leg with string and placed it between the kids who held tightly to the stiff wing feathers as the horses began a ponderous gallop up the last rise from town.

  Colts sat at home scraping the label from a flask of Corio whisky, 325-ml size. If he managed to tear the label cleanly off he would reward himself by finishing the bottle: that was the vow. It was sacred, a pledge to the heavens above. The glue was viciously strong. A small nip every half hour was the reward of effort, a result that seemed intolerable after five minutes and which Colts overcame by using his pocketknife and getting the label off just on dark. With blurred vision he counted the sticky moons of paper on the formica tabletop. They added up to the years of his life. A man on his own. What to do now? Up to the Five Alls seemed a pretty good answer, so he went.

  FIFTEEN

  NOW THAT COLTS HAD HIS driver’s licence suspended and a large fine to pay, with more penalties to come if he so much as climbed behind the wheel of a vehicle for the next eighteen months, Alan Hooke found himself getting out of the office dealing with clients more.

  Hooke spent the whole wet afternoon with Ted Merrington walking cows and calves down narrow gullies to a set of yards and drafting them out. It was miserable weather but satisfying work for men. Angry with Colts for backsliding, Hooke saw the day coming, and soon, when Colts would be sacked. But he’d said it before – been saying it on and off for twenty-five years, and Careful Bob before him. He was reminded by everyone who knew them. Colts’s life savings were wasted, the weatherboard house in Woodbox Gully was sold, the rental house was gone, movable assets all cashed, and God only knew where the money had gone. Down the hatch, obviously. The hundred acres Colts briefly owned on Duck Creek disappeared back into the landscape. Colts lived in a rented ruin Hooke found for him in a thistly paddock on the town creek. Hooke reflected that if he put him off he’d still look after him. That was a proven habit. The cost to his pocket would hardly exceed the cost to his feelings so far.

  Hooke, a man surrounded by women – wife, daughters, sisters, mother, aunts – needed male friendships to balance women’s utter convictions of how life should be lived. A vestige of this was Colts turning up for work each day with smiling, trembly-handed concentration, wafting an air of shamed cunning, blocking Hooke’s every attempt to understand him with stubborn pretence that nothing was wrong.

  Hooke and Merrington had opposite styles of doing the required job – Hooke being a quiet, effective prodder whereas Merrington swore and whacked animals’ rumps with a length of plastic pipe to get them moving. If a beast proved stubborn, craning its neck, red-eyed across a bony shoulder, Merrington took it personally while Hooke whistled and waited.

  Rain slanted from the south and ran over their hat brims and down their noses to their chins. Alan Hooke was a lean, light-complexioned man with a narrow, intelligent face and a flattened nose from boxing. In his youth he’d won the regional light heavyweight belt and few ever forgot that.

  Merrington was a big, jokey sort of a man, used to getting his own way, and when he didn’t, enforcing it. He was physically, naturally strong, but a bit slabbily overweight with a plum-coloured complexion, and gave his opinions freely. He was known to Hooke, and now Hooke was getting to know him better. Merrington had located this chunk of land while scouring the landscape for scrap steel with his sons and was in the business of turning himself into one of the types he’d bought from – a squatter of the Upper Isabel persuasion, semi-retired while his sons took over the running of the firm and dealing with scrap iron-hungry China.

  When a cow lurched heavily through the wrong gate, banging it sideways, splintering a panel, Merrington squatted in a puddle and belted mud with his polypipe, swearing in a rhythm of frustration and sending splats of wet manure all over himself.

  Alan Hooke had never quite seen that kind of thing before.

  When they got the cows away Merrington switched in the middle of a rant and turned to Hooke, raising a wild eyebrow: ‘Shall we take horses next time? Do you ride?’

  No answer needed to that. Hooke was raised in dealing stock for a family living, scouring the gullies of the Dividing Range from early youth with a hard-headed father on an irascible fat-bellied pony kept for the muster. There didn’t seem much point in taking horses when a walk along a ridge-top with a cattle dog was effective. But if Merrington wanted some galloping fun he’d oblige.

  Why Merrington had this effect on him Hooke couldn’t say. The divorce from Colts was part of the explanation. The man was well past fifty but like a spoiled child. It was the charm of the cheeky kid making demands, Hooke supposed – you might want to kick them but they made you grin, made you feel you could get them what nobody else could. Maybe that was the key to Merrington’s success in scrap, whittling down offers to the point of being begged to take it.

  Merrington looked for trouble on the simplest pretext.

  ‘You don’t always have to please me, Alan.’

  ‘I like to try.’

  ‘I don’t have to please you, though.’ Merrington threw a piratical grin. ‘Use your agent as a floor mop, as the old saying goes.’

  Hooke enjoyed the banter, the game of words. Merrington brought matters chin to chin and then swerved away with opposite meanings. So many of Hooke’s clients were hard-dealing men with no imagination to be otherwise. Judge Frederick Knox, who’d sold Merrington his house and land, was an example. Merrington’s fancy, it appeared, was to be in the Knox class. Tussock barons, Hooke’s father had called them, with never as much cash as acres since the 1950s but with resources to answer higher callings by virtue of being born to rule.

  Six months before, on auction day (Hooke wielding the hammer), Merrington won the homestead block excised from a larger spread. It offered barely a basic living in the chewed-out hills, but the riverbank house was a famous pile, a Professor Leslie Wilkinson design from 1923, and Merrington bragged the acreage would yield an impressive costs-to-income potential through his adroitness in beating the arse off a Knox.

  Except Merrington was a mere trier in the poverty stakes, really – Hooke’s rare contact with an owner who wasn’t an authentic hard case but wanted to be seen as one. The money he’d paid for plant and equipment after the auction was way above what anyone else in the district wanted to give. It reversed a trend of gentlemanly conduct when Merrington wrote a cheque without much haggling. It was always Hooke’s precaution, Dunn and Bradstreet-wise, to bite silver back to the source. This time no need for that – Merrington Metals was solid – but Hooke’s question was why Merrington had this almost wheedling need to be seen as someone he wasn’t. It turned out that Merrington had something to hide. Hooke learned he was the son of the madam, Betty Truegood, who made a fortune during the Second World War by converting terrace houses at the back of Victoria Street, Potts Point, into flashy brothels for American servicemen. A ringleted eight-year-old boy, Edward Truegood, being debouched from a
limousine at the gates of Cranbrook School was photographed in Pix magazine in 1950: this was this same florid Ted Merrington now transplanted to the Upper Isabel.

  Merrington wore a pair of stiff leather leggings found in a shed. Draped around his shoulders was an oilskin cape left hanging on a peg since the 1940s. He brought to mind a squatter from the Joliffe cartoons in Pix – a comical geezer with galahs in the corn and a Bugatti in the woolshed. Hooke calculated bringing Merrington up to date from the workwear side of the agency. He felt warm about his ironical client in the cold rain, catching a glint in Merrington’s eye that seemed to suggest Merrington reading Hooke’s thoughts and finding them tartly agreeable. They might even become friends. Hooke had reached a stage of life of wanting more zest from his usual cronies, denizens of the Apex Club and the Five Alls Hotel Galloping Wombats Polocrosse Squad, with Merrington a stiff breeze battering up from where housing estates crowded the boundaries of his scrap-metal yard and former farm acres.

  ‘That’s the way, Ted,’ said Hooke, with the calves jammed black and glistening in the race, smelling of panic. ‘You’ve got them sitting pretty.’

  Merrington accepted the tribute with a twisted smile.

  ‘You’re limping,’ Hooke observed.

  ‘It’s from a rodeo fall years ago.’

  ‘No kidding?’

  Merrington gave a toss of the head: ‘I went jackarooing up Wanaaring way, in the school hols. Stayed with the Jacky Whites, entered the bullock ride as a dare. I was a stupid young booger and now the sciatica stabs like a knife. Our generation needed a war but didn’t get it – cracked ribs and a fractured pelvis, they’re my battle scars while your old man got his medals at Tobruk, I understand.’

  ‘We had Vietnam,’ countered Hooke.

  ‘You believe so?’ Merrington’s neck elongated and his head wove like a alarmed snake’s, arrested in exaggerated surprise. ‘You were in that?’ He steadied and stared hard. It was possible that Merrington’s slum-terrace inheritance was revived for the R and R traffic of the 1960s and ’70s and Merrington a beneficiary.