When Colts Ran

by Roger McDonald

  Dalrymple had known nothing about it until Colts told him. Taking a long back road out of ample curiosity, Colts took a wrong turn and went for miles in the direction of sunset over bare hills.

  Almost on dark it was a camp of a sort Dalrymple came to. He had never seen anything like it – boom gates and mesh trackways leading between brightly lit bunkrooms. Climbing from the car that day was like arriving by flying saucer on the planet Earth still wrapped in its strangeness. A million bucks minimum in transportable comforts, there was no other way of describing it to Erica that expressed his decision fully, that there would be bankable cheques if he could get an in. Thus did a man immerse himself in a new dimension of revelation apologised for as money for the family purse.

  It was one of those infrastructure projects you didn’t read about in the papers anymore. When Dalrymple was a kid they were launched by prime ministers and relayed on national radio while explosives plungers were pushed and the earth shook. Now they were only written up in the financial pages. It was like receiving what he never counted on, but somehow always did, just in the nick of time – call it grace.

  Dalrymple ignored Keep Out signs and investigated the facilities. He fell into conversation with a bloke who told him a lot in the short walk they took from car park to poolroom. In a mess hall he ate lasagna and salad after getting a meal ticket from a cook who welcomed him. Then there was Eddie Slim. They greeted each other like long-lost brothers, which was hardly the case: as boys, Slim had smashed Dalrymple’s balsawood glider without saying sorry, and Slim’s father pawed Dalrymple’s mother after making promises laughed at in retrospect, when she was publicly called hysterical.

  They settled into the wet canteen, bringing up names. Normie Powell had flown with Dalrymple last year on contract, mapping wetlands across the Top End and doing loops and wing-overs for the hell of it between thunderheads.

  ‘So he’s the great man now,’ said Slim. Everyone he’d ever known had played a game of keeping him on the outer.

  It was the ideal job and Dalrymple hadn’t even known it was coming. On the phone he painted it to Erica as more or less local, home every weekend, but Australasian Gas Reach was the company name and Dalrymple reached indeed, wearing a monogrammed cap under the blue sky, filling a barcoded niche with his photograph laminated on plastic, occupation – Pilot Observer, Line Inspection Group – stamped in red letters. Home again, Erica laughed sideways and said he looked bought up. Only one word was needed to renew their conflict, and that was the one.

  After the first time it was a month before he was back home again – Erica talking about the charge it gave his balls, same as if it had been a woman, she said, the corners of her mouth tensing. Sometimes he was poised within sight of the sea, other times found himself with red dust between his teeth on the farthest fling of the pipeline west. His boy and his girl loved the presents he brought them, Barbie dolls and GI Joes from old-time cluttered general stores, last-minute grabbed.

  Erica incessantly asked what his feeling was, and if only he could articulate the feeling he could do anything, go anywhere, make free with their lives, she implied. The word summarising it for Dalrymple was waste, but how could he say it? Waste so intrinsically part of him it was beyond expression. She might think he meant his life was wasted with her, but no not that. Waste as defined by a process of nature, the wearing down of hills to the distant sea that he talked about with Eddie Slim as they sat in the purple dusk drinking themselves silly. Dalrymple ached being part of it although hills didn’t have feelings, only Dalrymple did.

  Of course a female was involved: a battered beauty sitting at the end of a dirt strip. Dalrymple ran his hands over the Maule taildragger’s fuselage and wrestled mockingly with the prop as if he were enlivening a living depressive. When he took her up, snarling along ridges in late afternoon light, holding to steep low circles with G-forces dragging his cheeks, he knew he was ready to die. But he didn’t or wouldn’t die, readiness being a condition of life now for Dalrymple.

  The task was to talk into a mike, interpreting and observing. He snarled the Maule over rocks and gullies in pursuit of its own dancing shadow a bare one hundred feet below. A spotter of broken fences, scrub fires, wild pigs, mobs of kangaroos and emus by the hundreds, camels and horses, of tracked intrusions into no-go zones, Dalrymple was paid to think aloud, a connoisseur of himself. It was dollars for dreaming, he declared on the quiet in case he spoiled his luck. Anyone who wanted to go for a spin he took them. Often it was Eddie, that schoolteacher’s metal-struck boy from years past, who talked about going back, buying a piece of land on the Isabel with goldmining water races overgrown with trees and delving for gold.

  West of a dusty railhead there was a week when Erica came with the kids in the school holidays, the Honda loaded with camping gear. ‘We apologise for our interruption,’ she said, unable to make any utterance free from bitterness until Dalrymple came home. They couldn’t touch, or meet eyes really, yet had a treaty going when Dalrymple flew, Erica settling something inside herself alongside of him, allowing her fate was all his for the skyborne duration.

  It was gold-bearing, semi-desert country where mines opened in good years when the exchange rate was favourable and closed in the bad; an expanse of quartzy ridges, scarred watercourses, cold winds over the saltbush plains. It excited Slim in the passenger seat. The gas field itself was another five or six horizons north-west and Dalrymple was thinking of nothing when a wink of mellow light came from a scraped arena during a lazy turn. He applied power and around he went again, noting the landmarks. Slim said nothing.

  Over cold beers leaving Olympic rings of condensation on a formica tabletop, Slim told Dalrymple how gas-bearing strata was mined. Down a borehole thousands of metres deep a gel mixed with ball bearings was pumped under extreme pressure until a cap of rock was shattered and the gas released from that was taken off.

  ‘Exciting stuff,’ said Dalrymple.

  It was, said Slim, but not the same as gold, that mythical magma of the soul, and he gave Dalrymple a smile that seemed to say he was on to him.

  Next day Slim and Dalrymple set off in Slim’s Toyota, taking Kim, Polly and Rachel, Slim’s fourteen-year-old, Dalrymple asking them to keep their eyes peeled across particular claypans he remembered from the sky.

  ‘For what?’ said Slim with that same amused although calculating sidelong glance he’d give a bloke to make him wonder.

  Dalrymple had a feeling of heavy excitement, a gambler’s certainty. Astonishingly that same glint he’d seen from the air answered him on the flat. Implying no special reason for asking, he asked Slim to turn one-eighty degrees. Slim’s kid, Rachel, picked up on it although all Dalrymple said was he saw a flash, as from broken glass.

  The vehicle stopped, the kids jumped out and started racing.

  It was in the papers, the legal wrangle, ownership hanging on when the word – gold – was spoken in relation to the glint, and by whom, to whom. For it had not been Dalrymple who spoke it, said the judge, but the geologist Slim’s precocious daughter – never Dalrymple to whom gold must henceforth be described as having no earthly function or use, merely a product of time rolling its planetary weight over him and excreting under pressure the essence of something lived. In a word, waste.

  Or so Erica, who pursued the Slims in court, earned the right to think.

  For Slim’s Rachel reached the nugget, shouted her claim to Slim and squealingly attacked the soon to be celebrated lump, while the others watched, standing back as if from the heat of a blaze. Slim got around behind his girl and the pair wrenched it loose, quite unable to hold the prize, grasping its slippery lugs, clods of earth falling from pitted hollows of tremendous weight as they wheezed.

  The nugget was called the Slim Find and displayed in the foyer of the Chifley Building flanked by armed security guards, an object of extravagant disbelief worth dollars in multiples of hundreds
of thousands on the gold market, but to a pair of competing billionaires, bidding for the nugget intact, worth much more. Slim dealt with them, whatever it did to his soul, and the Dalrymple claimants were awarded just enough, after costs, for Erica’s three-bedroom cottage mortgage-free after their separation. There she lived to this day in Railway Street, Isabel Junction. Dalrymple kept the Honda.

  Reaching into his backpack Dalrymple drew out the bottle of Islay malt he’d carefully but self-deludingly stashed and refrained from telling himself he had the whole damn day long. How beautiful that spirit looked through its warps of glass when held to the last of light. A goblet, he called the Pyrex tumbler he carried for the purpose of civilised enjoyment.

  By the time Dalrymple mixed his drink among the reeds of Duck Creek a torrent of cold air descended to nose level. High, dark banks guided him to the north-west. He calculated two drinks would bring him to a point where striking up from the bank would bring him onto the road. Rather than a blundering return through his own former paddocks he would follow the road back to his car. The route would take him through the bottom of Cud Langley’s land, then Tim Knox’s land, then he would reach Claude Bonney’s land.

  On the creekbank horizon line the lights of Bonney’s house winked through frosty air as Dalrymple navigated closer. He was almost to the end of his second drink, mentally juggling the idea of a third, when a voice exploded from the creek ahead of him.

  ‘Fuck! Fuckin’ water! Fuckin’ barbed wire!’

  It was Damon Pattison. Dalrymple cowered against the bank, amazed. The sound of grunts and splashes came from a mere twenty metres away when he’d felt alone in the universe. As he wriggled to the top of the bank, a flume of shotgun-fire sparked red across the gully and a shot rang out.

  A second voice yelled, ‘Anyone there? Is that you, Damon?’

  It was Claude Bonney.

  Lying prone, tasting gravel, heart thumping, Dalrymple awaited the next shot. He heard the raspy breathing of his fellow night-marauder crouched below in the reeds: Damon Pattison scouting around the night paddocks looking for thrills, defining himself away from Wirra-ding and its set routines. Whatever was happening made Dalrymple’s presence an excess of one. At that moment the ghost of himself detached itself from his company without even the politeness of a farewell. He rolled, scrambled to his knees and ran off.

  Later that night he appeared at Erica’s door, arguing his way in. ‘Just for tonight,’ she said. God knew why she bothered, but something about Dalrymple made her reverse a previous stand – grass sticks in his hair, seedily drunk, that was expected, but a light that had often disturbed her gone from his eyes. It wouldn’t do to tell him that something was gone, doused, drained. He wouldn’t know what to put in its place. Nor would he have to try. She showed him to the spare room and told him to take a hot bath and sleep in if that’s what he needed. But to be gone by late morning.

  Then she went back through the house collecting her car keys and a few belongings and headed out the north-western road, to a high rocky knoll where there was once a one-teacher school. A new life was beginning. The three-acre block had languished on Education Department inventories since the school was closed down. The titles were deemed to have been locked up in bureaucracy, but Fred Donovan had dusted them off during a file search and closed a deal. Such a deal had eluded Eddie Slim for years. Donovan was clever like that. Slim was furious. Served him right for taking what wasn’t his, a great big chunk of happiness by the name of gold. All that remained of the teacher’s residence and schoolroom was the bell-strut jammed stiff, rusted supports on a splintery hardwood pole. Back out of sight of the road was an area scraped clean of old bricks and twisted plumbing where a house would rise from the earth, built of earth.

  Donovan was in daily contact with Erica by email or phone. He’d drawn her into his world, his way of seeing things, through a phenomenal bout of finding no-one to equal her over the years and getting in touch after her divorce from Gil. She conceded her life was a dream. She would give him that.

  Blink awake Erica and be in love – F. Donovan. What thou seest when thou dost wake, do it for thy true-love take – Wm. Shakespeare.

  All right, she would. From her high vantage point overlooking misty riverflats and hazy humpy ranges, she watched car lights shifting along the district roads until one broke free of the rest and commenced its steady, brightening progress up towards her.

  EIGHTEEN

  CLAUDE BONNEY FOUND the fresh footprint on the steep side of the creekbank a few hundred metres from his house. It was the mark of a boot with a ridged sole, showing distinctly on a step of eroded clay.

  Bonney had never before seen such an intricate pattern except in fossiliferous strata, among ferns and podocarps before there was anything human on the face of the Earth. The print belonged to no-one he knew, indeed who came down to this tangle-rooted, steep location except Bonney himself? There was Tim Knox and Cud Langley but the rest of the neighbours along the Duck and Isabel bends were gone, and this end of the district was stripped of working farms. Farther back towards town, farmland was carved into smaller and smaller blocks to make what were once called hobby farms, but now were called rural acreage, as if they needed to be put to no other use except to be framed in tight fences and given their house, shed, dam and For Sale sign.

  The print was heavy-pressed two metres below him, a mark etched by the spring water oozing out around it, as distinct as a freshly revealed husk or glistening half-tide shell. It bespoke the full weight of a person standing motionless, the presence of an intruder.

  Bonney looked around. Pathways led through the dry reeds and juvenile willows, but they were made by animals – waterbirds, foxes, stray sheep. Nowhere could Bonney see the blundering signs of breakage indicating a human going through.

  Claude Bonney, photographer and botanical illustrator, when working his wetlands wore green rubberised waders up to his armpits and moved in drugged, silent fashion along banks and through swamps with his camera and collecting gear around his neck, his freed hands repositioning each bent reed and betrayal of his retreat as if he were gently rowing.

  He slithered down for a closer look, clutching poplar roots for handles as his heels gouged into the clay. He stood parallel to the mark, twisting himself to face the direction of whoever had stood there before. Slowly and deliberately raising his head, Bonney found himself staring through grass a few hundred metres in a direct line to the windows of his house. He tapped his pockets and withdrew the small folding binoculars he routinely carried and found himself looking directly into his bedroom. He saw Jacquie lean from a window flapping a rug. The dogs leapt at her and he heard her shrieks of laughter as she encouraged their antics.

  That night he saw him, the shadowy cut-out of a man making his way up the creekbed after dark, a torchbeam flashing in the frost, on and off, on and off, ice-shine up the poplars for a hundred feet. ‘Fuck! Fuckin’ water! Fuckin’ barbed wire!’ Then nothing except silence and darkness.

  Bonney recognised the voice. What’s the silly bastard doing? he thought. I’ll give him a scare.

  Above the creek, Bonney stood on a rocky knoll holding his shotgun, barely breathing. He fired into the silence, the butt of the .12 gauge kicking against his shoulder, a concentrated hard flash igniting the lower night.

  The sound echoed away. ‘Anyone there?’ shouted Bonney. A stupid question. Then after a long wait, hissed, ‘Come on up, Damon, I know it’s you.’

  Throughout this lonely, star-dark end of the district there had been a spate of robberies lately. Stud sheep mustered from roadside paddocks after midnight, bales of wool rolled from shearing sheds at two in the morning, diesel drained from overhead tanks at dawn, fine wool lambs scooped from paddocks by organised gangs running silently, swiftly over the frost, gathering weaners under their arms the way the wind gathered fallen leaves. Knox was done over. Cud Langley ditto.

&nb
sp; Bonney hadn’t suspected Damon Pattison before.

  ‘Was it you?’ demanded Bonney the next day.

  Damon Pattison chortled, ‘Would I do that to a mate?’

  ‘Do what?’ said Bonney.

  ‘Pinch his stuff.’

  Bonney looked at the younger man sideways. ‘Well, that’s interesting, I didn’t say anything about “stuff”. Just was it you in the creek, mate?’

  ‘I’m not stupid. The way people look at me in this place . . .’

  ‘Drunk or stoned in the paddocks,’ said Bonney. ‘Cutting across country. I was out there with a gun.’

  ‘It’s a free country.’

  ‘I decided to give them a scare. I could have killed whoever it was.’

  ‘I would have shook your hand,’ said Pattison. He continued carving a lump of wood while Bonney watched him, a hawk escaping his big-handed attempts. The sadness, the disappointment was there.

  They seemed to have an understanding after this. Damon Pattison started attaching himself to Bonney’s world, appearing unannounced every day or so, chopping wood for Jacquie, mending the roof, teasing the younger girls and not saying a word to the older ones, except looking forlorn. The broken artistry of existence longed for connection.

  ‘Give me a look at your boots,’ said Bonney one day.

  ‘Like them?’ said Damon, hopping around on one leg.

  They were the ones. They both knew it.

  ‘Wait’ll I get you aligned in my sights,’ said Damon.

  ‘You’d be lucky, I’m bulletproof,’ said Bonney, who’d had poachers after him in Zambia and raskols leaping from the undergrowth in PNG, bites from a brown snake and a near-fatal sea-stinger attack.

  Normie Powell wasn’t so lucky. Bonney was called to the phone to hear the worst.

  Normie, these days, was all heart but medically speaking weak-hearted. He would have been safer in an Edwardian novel where he’d wear a solar topee, a white linen suit, take sea voyages, excite ageing spinsters, outlive the strong. Instead he was all man, kept working, half killed himself in cardio stress tests, had a family of five to support and the memory of a father who was only fully himself in water, and just for that memorable once.