When Colts Ran

by Roger McDonald

  Merrington scuttled around the table waving a new bottle and topping up glasses.

  Liz asked in a change of subject: ‘Who can define the word “jackaroo”? Alan gives me a different answer every time.’

  Annabelle shot straight back, ‘Young man of good family paid peanuts to slave in hope of advancement.’

  ‘Oh, I like that!’

  ‘It’s certainly not a holiday job,’ said Hooke, remembering Merrington’s boast that he’d jackarooed in the school holidays many years ago. The judgement was out before he realised.

  ‘Beg yours?’

  ‘Well, remember you told me – ’

  Merrington snorted. ‘Of course I remember what I told you! Want to see my X-rays, or do you want to step outside?’

  Frizell touched Hooke’s elbow and winked, ‘Don’t stay past midnight. Fun till then.’

  Merrington tapped his fork on the edge of the dinner service. When Hooke looked up a pair of hooded, hawkish eyes met his. Too late already.

  ‘Do you want to put a price on that mountain grazing, Al, or just leave it to your wife to bargain me in over some dross on my walls?’

  ‘Not if she’s a loved one,’ said Liz.

  ‘Loved one, my arse,’ said Merrington.

  ‘I’d rather leave it to Lizzie,’ said Hooke. ‘What do I know about art? Anyway, it’s a private arrangement, price not the most important factor, and I’d rather not discuss it in front of these people anyway.’

  ‘You’ve lost me,’ said Frizell, raising his hands in goofy surrender.

  At this moment Dominique left for the kitchen with an armload of plates, sending a glance at her husband fearful with appeasement.

  Hooke felt cold and humourless. To have given, and to have hoped – well, that was past attempting.

  Merrington turned to Annabelle almost coaxingly. ‘What should I do, young one? Let go the one she wants?’

  ‘You’re asking me?’ Annabelle pointed a finger at herself, leaned forward and laughed, then tossed her long blonde hair back over her slim shoulders. ‘It depends what you want to do,’ she said with quick clarity.

  Hooke interrupted, his voice blowing through the silenced room like a dry wind clearing a way for itself as it went.

  ‘I made a gesture of friendship, Ted. That’s all it was. But if you want me to tell you, I will. The grazing’s worth lots. Take it or leave it. Otherwise, believe me, you’re out of the game and the RSPCA will slap a writ on you for starving your herd.’

  ‘I’ll choose another picture,’ said Liz.

  ‘Can’t have that,’ said Hooke. ‘It’s the one, or the offer is zilch.’

  There was a long, uncertain silence and then Merrington made a loud mock yelp of pain.

  ‘Done!’

  He brought the painting around a few days later, insisting on finding the best place in the house to hang it – ‘Where she’ll feel at home,’ he quipped. Liz was wary of him at first, then enjoyed the visit and was moved when Merrington stood in front of the picture and said his goodbyes, folding his hands in front of himself ceremonially meek, like a chastened small boy, the ringleted cherub of yesteryear, addressing a few words to the face.

  ‘Wherever you are in outer space, look down on us kindly for our sins.’

  ‘Amen,’ said Liz with a sense of having softened Merrington almost to the point of confession.

  They took tea on the verandah corner overlooking the ram paddock. It was where Hooke sat with his shotgun on wild nights, waiting for town dogs to try their worst. ‘Your husband’s a tough cookie,’ he said, ‘drives a hard bargain.’

  ‘He sees that in you,’ said Liz.

  Merrington asked were Abbey and Tina interested in coming up to Burnside.

  ‘I believe they are,’ said Liz. ‘They’re on a savings junket for the overseas experience.’

  Liz had, besides, on the absolute q.t., made a phone call to Annabelle Frizell to ask if there’d been anything out of order when she sat for Merrington – men with paintbrushes being what they were in the moustache-twirling department.

  ‘Not a jot,’ Annabelle confirmed, ‘not a whisper of anything untoward. You heard him, he hates all that. Though I did unbutton my shirt when he asked.’ Then she paused to express something perhaps she knew, but couldn’t quite be said. ‘I think I scared him, but aren’t your girls quite strong? Anyway, Dominique’s there in the next room cooking up a storm. She’s super-duper.’

  So Abbey came down three weeks later because Tina had found work at Just Jeans and she hadn’t. She stayed the weekend at the Merrington house, starting early, finishing late.

  ‘What was it like?’ Hooke said as he drove her back to the station.

  ‘It was all right. Plenty of hours but a bit boring. You try and sit without moving for days on end. He asked me to come again the weekend after next.’

  ‘Will you?’

  ‘I have to, don’t I, if I want the trip?’

  ‘I’m matching your earnings dollar for dollar,’ said Hooke.

  ‘I know that, Dad. He asked lots of questions about you – how you got your land cheap, how Grandpa did. He thinks you’re smarter than most.’

  ‘Does he indeed. Then that’s all right, then.’

  But Hooke was over Merrington pretty much.

  It was Liz who collected Abbey after the next weekend of sittings – Abbey collapsed in tears, hunched in the passenger seat almost as soon as they drove from the Merrington front yard. What she told Liz shocked her, but Abbey, shrieking, made her promise not to tell anyone. Liz said she would have to tell Alan.

  ‘No, not Dad. I handled it all right, didn’t I? I told him to stop, and he stopped it.’

  ‘You were brilliant in the circumstances.’

  ‘Dad’ll only do something about it. He’ll say something. He’ll tell people. He’ll go to the police. Oh, my God. He’ll make a mess.’

  She sat huddled against the car window.

  ‘That’s what really has to happen,’ said Liz.

  ‘He said it was our secret and “don’t tell Al”.’

  Liz felt sick.

  She waited until Abbey had left on the train and then she went home and told Hooke. ‘Abbey wants to handle this herself,’ she said when she’d done. She doubted if Hooke heard her.

  *

  Later that night Hooke sat on the verandah waiting for dogs to come slinking around his sheep. It was when they came, full moon, the shadows of poplars shortening and the hare in the moon sitting up, ears twitching amid the craters and seas of white.

  Hooke’s anger poured through his thoughts unstoppably. It didn’t feel like his own emotion, strangely, but like something drawn down from a poisonous sac Merrington knew better than he did. How could he have been such a fool as to miss what was going on? All those occasions when Merrington needled him and it was hatred, parasitic, harmful.

  He didn’t think of himself though, but of Abbey and Tina. He remembered all those times following their bikes through the sparkling mornings, keeping them safe until school. The feeling had never left him.

  It was mostly newcomers’ dogs Hooke caught, their owners never believing their animals had it in them – claiming their dogs weren’t sheep killers, believing they’d never hurt anyone. They kept those arguments to the end, when confronted. Dogs loved sheep with a madman’s fetish. They bailed them frightened in corners and savaged them helpless. Only the ram stood ground with a line of courage when Hooke strode to the rescue, nights when he came upon Hollywood Boy III hurling dogs from his bloodied shoulders and meeting their return rush like a hardwood plank tufted with fibre.

  Intoxicated with discovery, the dogs returned to their owners’ knees and bestowed aroused gazes. He could guess the welcome: ‘What have you been up to, rascal?’

  Pretty s
oon Hooke would make a phone call. ‘I’m sorry, but it can’t happen again.’

  ‘Can’t? Who are you to say that?’

  ‘I’m Hooke the stock agent.’

  If he saw the owners in town he eyed them over. No longer did Hooke seem the genial and pleasant bloke they’d heard about. They went around to see where the damage was done, down near the farm boundary fence where a laneway ran between poor weatherboard houses with roofs of rusting tin. Across the end was well-strained ringlock with strands of barb on top and below. There was a sign painted on a steel drum filled with concrete: Loose Dogs Will Be Shot. They hadn’t seen it before, or if they had, thought it was just graffiti.

  On nights when wind sucked and rain blew they listened as sounds were carried. Was that a distant wild yelping, was it their imaginations, was it the thud of a shotgun blast muted by storm? It made the hairs on the back of the neck stand up.

  It was a misty dawn a few days later when stock trucks arrived at a side fence of Merrington’s Burnside, well away from the grand house. Boltcutters were used. A fence swiftly parted, wire rolled back and trucks backed in. Merrington woke late hearing confused bellows and went up the hill to find his herd returned to him. Placed under the verandah eaves away from the drizzle was the painting of his mother, the madam, so full of the outrageousness of life and unfairness of life captured by an unknown hand.

  One afternoon as shadows deepened Hooke drove to the Bullock Run. Time had passed but there wasn’t a moment when his anger abated. Just the appeal of Abbey stayed his reaction. She wanted to follow it through and couldn’t say what she would do or how she would do it or when – and so they let the matter stay between them, always waiting. It had been like this for quite a while now, as Hooke bent to the rule of women but assessed suitable planks that would do for a man. He stashed them in various places ready for a change of policy and always carried an iron bar in the car in case he met Merrington on a lonely road somewhere, just the two of them, no witnesses, and he couldn’t help himself, God help him.

  Cresting the last ridge, Hooke just made the overlook in time to see his sleek beasts like ghosts standing in the rye and sharing the pasture with kangaroos. Big greys too, major eaters, but he didn’t shoot them. If he had a painter’s skill, he thought, he would take a lifetime to get them down – the way they spread alarmed across the far slope hopping like fleas, or else the one standing fast, the big buck chest-growling, head cocked sideways, protecting his females with troubled integrity.

  What else could Hooke do up there except sculpt the gullies with hoe and backpack spray against burr and thistle, keeping them clean for abundance? Sometimes he waited on a high ridge with a Winchester .44-40 cradled, ready for a file of marauding pigs to appear, and when they came, busy tuskers rambling and snouting on short legs, turning the pasture over with the wastefulness of fools, he sent them spinning with well-placed rounds of snap and rapid. Apart from fencing and drenching, there was nothing much else to do and then it was time to get back to his sheep.

  Cattle were easier than sheep by far. But sheep were more the measure of a man in the world Hooke loved. He must talk about this to Colts. It was a wisdom Hooke puzzled over as he drove back to town listening to the sound of his tyres spitting gravel: how a wreck and a failure might be the distillation of meaning waiting to be learned.

  SEVENTEEN

  AFTER THE 1990S CAME THAT whirling run of zeroes, with age unbidden the theme of men who’d leapfrogged decades barely remembered in a stretch of work and forgetfulness watered by booze.

  Dalrymple stopped the car at a familiar road junction and made a call he didn’t like making. It was to an official with an office on the Isabel where a dam was proposed, augmenting the capital’s water, nobody knew when, or even how as the Isabel was a weedy drain most seasons. The good years were gone. Dalrymple, once intrinsically of those parts, requested, almost cravenly begged permission to park his car at a padlocked gate and walk to a deserted location.

  ‘We don’t normally allow access.’

  But this was Dalrymple, mate, Gil Dalrymple. He didn’t have germs on his shoes. Around about spread paddocks once owned by his father. There was an Oliver Dalrymple Lane in a subdivision. ‘The Flying Saucer Road, river to the stars, those of us that lived here celebrate the sky.’

  A considered blank at the other end of the line. ‘Don’t know you, fella.’

  Dalrymple chanced a last passport of sorts.

  ‘I’m a mate of Colts’s,’ and a trace of suspicion slipped from the man’s voice.

  ‘Phone me again on the way out.’

  ‘Shall do.’

  ‘And say g’day to Kings. How is he, the old fart?’

  ‘Battling.’

  Dalrymple palmed the phone into the glove box and nosed north along the dusty farm road. It used to be lots busier as he came barrelling down, averting head-ons on the blind crests with his kids yelling in the back, belting each other around the ear-lugs with their schoolbags. Now Dalrymple crept along in memory, tracking the cold, alienated landscape in a battered Honda Civic, a scroll of dust flattening behind, limp grey hair, formerly golden, tousled in the wind, blue-washed eyes narrowed.

  It had taken him a few years to make the return to the Isabel, promised himself since he couldn’t remember when. No planning involved, just a hung left from the highway as he followed the tilted signpost on a whim: Duck Creek 13 km. All other times across the severed years he’d gone straight on, making whistling-bys with a no thanks, another time’ll do. Such a bunch of crooks and misfits spraying thistles, herding sheep into broken-wired yards, his mates, confidants and customers calling for fairy dust, it made Dalrymple grin.

  Having seen Colts go down, Dalrymple’s chances hadn’t been good. All those saloon bar discussions canvassing world politics, livestock, rugby, flying, women and ghosts. Now Colts was a ghost of his former self – a ghost of a ghost – being nursed in Sandstone Cottage by Randolph Knox of decent persuasion. Word was that Randolph rationed Colts whisky and Colts painted the cottage as thanks, teetering up a ladder and wavering along a plank half shickered at seventy-five.

  Arriving at the highest ridgeline the Duck Creek road ribboned ahead, empty and familiar. Life was a matter of avoiding then meeting fates as a product of avoidance. In an Isabel Junction cottage Dalrymple’s ex-wife, Erica, was making a new life for herself. A sixty-year-old man in a gaudy bow tie was courting her. His name: Fred Donovan.

  Claude Bonney had put a biologist’s slant on it, trying to make Dalrymple feel better, saying it was a phenomenon of human sex display that second-string boyfriends from decades past came back into women’s lives offering new beginnings and statistically women went for them.

  ‘She’d never mentioned him. He’s an architect?’

  ‘Back in the Hen House days he was a failed student railway worker pinching stuff and filling his head with big ideas. She hardly noticed him, to be honest.’

  Bonney was the one who’d won her first, but not for long before Dalrymple made his bid and after a whirlwind romance they married. As Bonney’s next-door neighbours, out on the Duck, Dalrymple flew while Erica remained the zoological illustrator doing the best, most exquisite work in the country, but only at approximately the rate of one or two finished plates per year, the proofs of which she passed over the boundary fence of their adjoining properties for Claude’s wondering and exasperated appreciation.

  Very strange, hummed Dalrymple, this place of lives lived now gone. A man was given for the sake of convenience a name, while littered behind him were occupations, identities, marriages, mistakes. It seemed like a summary of existence to slither the gravel, a moment of shedding skins should anyone ask for a definition. Was it the man himself or the life he lived doing the moulting? A hunch that was encouraging said the life, while those inclined to find fault blamed the man.

  Dalrymple best knew the drainage
system of the Isabel from the air. At a thousand feet, trimmed level after dumping super, tracking past Duck Creek heading for Mt Stony, he’d habitually glanced down on the house he owned, gaunt paddocks and a carpet of pines along the creek, the old meat-house like a matchbox where carcases hung in winter, cased in fat for a week, colder than any fridge.

  The frost hollows shaded purple always told Dalrymple there were eighteen minutes left to set down on the Mt Stony strip, and God help him if a ground mist came in.

  Dunno why, that thought always made him smile. Now he’d never fly again. Too risky-disky.

  Large hands on the steering wheel, quick glance in the rearview mirror – an inner voice playing mental radio, bits of old songs nasally hummed, conversations with a blowfly Dalrymple couldn’t get out of the car.

  ‘You are my sunshine, my only sunshine’ – thwack!

  The vehicle swerved on the dry grass verges. Leaning from the window Dalrymple followed energetic gyrations of paired lorikeets braiding and sweeping a fence line, making cries of metallic music as they flipped and went.

  ‘Come back, return, I’m yours, goodbye.’

  Every phrase so plaintively familiar. But where did that voice come from, apparently dictating one’s existence? Was it Dalrymple’s own, or shared?

  The ghost of himself, it was, he reflected, as he re-engaged gear and drove on. Talking to that fellow back there certainly had the feeling. Jamboree of ghost men on the Isabel.

  Dalrymple glanced at his knuckles on the steering wheel. Very solid my friend, you are, he told himself. The contours of bare hills and broken clay cuttings and their absence of obvious beauty were part of him. Ditto yellowed grass the pelt of a lion. Mentally he reached for morning mists and mugs of tea awaiting the sun’s melt-off. There behind the hangar he stood emptying his bladder into the shaggily frosted gullies.