Dust Off the Bones

by Paul Howarth

  Billy stopped abruptly. “You ain’t got no right . . . what’s all this to you anyway? What do you stand to gain?”

  “Nothing. I already told you.”

  “Well then, how much would it cost to make you go away?”

  “It’s not really a question of money.”

  “Try me. Or I could just as easily shoot you and bury you and nobody round here would bat an eye.”

  “I’m sure that’s probably true, but it wouldn’t do you any good.”

  “Do you less.”

  “The inquest will continue, I mean. The wheels will still turn. This goes to the highest level in Brisbane, they won’t just stop for me. In fact, they’d probably only investigate all the harder.”

  An exaggeration, but Henry was gambling. Billy went to the window and looked out. “So if I can’t pay you, or shoot you, how do I stop this thing?”

  “Work with me. Testify. Tell them what really happened. We’ll put Noone behind bars, or worse. Men have hung for far less.”

  Billy laughed and sat down and lit another cigarette. “Have you met him?”

  “I have, yes.”

  “And you still think he’ll hang?”

  “He’s a man like any other, subject to the laws of this land.”

  “You’re a fucking idiot.”

  “Please, Mr. McBride, all I’m asking—”

  “Do you have a family yourself, Henry?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you want to see them dead?”

  “Now just a minute, that’s completely uncalled for.”

  Billy blew out smoke and shrugged. “He wouldn’t think so. In fact, he’d probably consider it rude to let them live. Christ Almighty, the balls on you, sitting there talking like this is some game. This is my life you’re toying with. And yours. Them laws might work in Brisbane but they don’t count for shit out here, at least not with a man like Noone.”

  “Which is precisely why he must be prosecuted.”

  “You’re not listening. You’ll get nothing out of it. You’re wasting your time.”

  “Not if you testify. I guarantee that together we would win.”

  “Together,” Billy sneered. He stubbed out the cigarette on the arm of the chair, rose slowly to his feet, went to the door and paused with his hand on the knob. “You ain’t worth the dags on my arse hairs, you dumb fucking city cunt.”

  He left, and a breath washed out of Henry. Scrambling from the bed, he got to the door in time to see Billy plodding down the stairs. He fumbled around on the dresser for his key, found it there alongside Reverend Bean’s, and his hand shaking wildly, slid it into the lock and turned it and heard the bolt click fast.

  Chapter 22

  Tommy McBride

  In the still and silent night he left Urandangi, leading two spare horses behind him, the bags stuffed with whatever supplies he’d managed to find. He looked back at the hotel aglow in the darkness and imagined Jack in there with Alan Ames, strong-arming him to a table, the revolver pinning him in place, then plying him with drink till he passed out. With any luck he would wake late the next morning and agree to Jack’s offer of work, groggily joining the group heading north. Worst case, he’d manage to slip away and raise the alarm, breathlessly explaining how he’d caught the fugitive Tommy McBride and that he was currently fleeing west, which would also suit Tommy just fine. Now he understood Jack’s meaning. He didn’t know any cattle trails out west. The only trail he knew well enough to attempt on his own was the one Jack had painstakingly taught him, trip after trip, as they’d droved it together all these years: the Georgina River and Eyre’s Creek down to Birdsville, then the Birdsville Track to Marree. Long hungry days in the saddle, little or nothing to eat, many of the waterholes reduced to fly-infested puddles by the drought. He sucked up the water greedily, at times so clogged with sand and grit it was easier to chew than drink. At least there was no cattle to see to. Just himself and the horses, which each day he rode as hard and far as he dared.

  When finally he reached the outskirts of Marree he paused on the plains overlooking the town, the familiar outline of the buildings, the peculiar silhouettes of the camel trains. It was so tempting. Collect the latest letter from Arthur, a meal among friendly faces; he could almost taste the beer. But they knew him in Marree better than anywhere these days: they had police, and a telegraph line, and all the risks those things entailed. So he kept a safe distance, too far away to be recognized, just another anonymous rider crossing the empty plains, and stopped instead in Farina, where he was one of many weary travelers passing through. He cleaned himself up, restocked and recuperated, gave the horses a chance to do the same, then set out south again, intending to head for Adelaide; he wanted to get his money out of that bank. But the longer he rode the more risky the city felt. There were more coppers in Adelaide than anywhere, and although Jack hadn’t used his full alias in front of Ames, his description could well be out there: his fair hair like a beacon, his missing fingers a red cross painted on his shirt back. That left hand of his had plagued him ever since he’d hurt it, an unshakable reminder of what he’d done. Every time he rolled a cigarette, lifted a mug, took Beau’s reins in his hands, he’d feel the tug of memory, or a snapshot of that morning would flash before his eyes. The native biting his fingers; the fight with Billy that tore one loose. He had broken Billy’s nose that day—did his brother get the same flashbacks, Tommy wondered, when he saw his face in the looking glass?

  He decided to avoid Adelaide, for now at least. Take his time about getting down there, let the urgency (if there was any) drain from the pursuit. High in the Flinders Ranges he built a camp on a tree-stubbled hillside beneath a sandstone ridge, rigging a canvas for shade and shelter, digging a stone-lined firepit beside a fallen tree trunk against which he could lean his back. There was water at the bottom of the hillside, and sometimes he managed to catch a fish, otherwise he did well for meat by hunting rock wallabies, goannas, roos. Evenings he would climb the ridge to a lookout and sit on the slab, smoking a cigarette and watching the sunset, the golden light receding over the plains. A certain peace being up here. Nothing like the last time he ran. He was far more capable for one thing, and he trusted Jack to deal with Alan Ames. He’d come a fair old distance. Bewley to St. George, St. George to Marree, and everywhere else in between. Half a continent nearly, and still plenty out there he hadn’t seen. But he understood this country better now than he ever had: it was easier if you accepted the land was king. Most whites struggled because they fought it, tried to bend it to their will, but this wasn’t a place that could be tamed. Better to live within it, alongside it, on its own terms—how long had the natives lived like that, happily, before the first boats came?

  Summer arrived and he had to move on; the heat became unbearable in the hills. The hunting grew scarce and the water levels fell and he worried about the horses in the sun. So out of the ranges he wandered, like some hermit leading his caravan, only to run into a pair of boundary riders as he crossed what must have been station land. They asked where he was headed; Tommy said he was looking for work, if they had any, and one of the men considered the state of him and scoffed. “Doubt it,” the other told him, “but there’s food and hot water if you can pay for it—the boss don’t take in no strays.” With a nod Tommy followed them, and that night lay soaking in the first hot bath he’d had in months.

  They bred horses as well as sheep on Bluewater, as he learned the station was called, and Tommy fell in with the trainers and breakers the next morning at the corral, talking about the different breeds and their temperaments, the particular characters each had known. Again Tommy asked if there was work going, horses or sheep, he didn’t mind; and again the answer came back no. But he could stay on as a dogger, the manager told him, paid by the ear plus meals and a bed, assuming he could handle a rifle and didn’t mind shooting dingos. “You got a spare rifle?” Tommy asked him, and the next day he found himself riding Beau through unfamiliar pastures on the lookout f
or his first kill.

  It didn’t take long to find one. A lone male skulking through the bush, the red-brown flash of its pelt. Tommy dismounted and hushed Beau with an outstretched hand; the horse nickered and snuffled the grass. Tommy moved forward, into the trees, the dingo lost to him for now. Another memory leaped up at him: hunting with Billy as children, trespassing beyond the blue gums and onto John Sullivan’s land. He shook it off but they were coming after him, more and more these days. As if these years of droving, the summers in Adelaide, the drinking and carousing with Jack, had managed to pull a blindfold over his past, and now without those things to distract him the blindfold had been ripped clean off.

  He followed the dingo to a shallow creek bed, watched it sniff the water and drink, ears twitching, Tommy creeping closer through the brush. He propped himself against a tree trunk and raised the rifle. It was already loaded. Heavy in his hands, warm against his cheek. He waited. His breathing slowed. Praying for a clean shot. The dingo lifted its head quickly then bent to the water again, Tommy telling himself not yet, not yet, but if not now then when? He fired. A roar from the rifle, the kick of the recoil, and the dog keeled over on its side. Another memory hit him. Catching that group of natives and a pack of wild dogs, Raymond Locke with a spear in his shoulder, putting one of the dogs down. Tommy cried out and slapped himself hard on the side of the head, as if to knock the memories loose, lurched to his feet and went down into the creek bed. The dingo lay dead in the water. Blood trickled away in the stream. Tommy took hold of its tail and heaved it up the creek bank and here came another one: Rabbit dragging the dead kangaroo out of the sand-drift, the other troopers applauding; “Good tucker these buggers. Yum yum!”—panting, Tommy propped his rifle against a tree and hacked off the dog’s ear with his knife.

  He left the dingo for the flies and birds and dropped the ear into the bloodied pouch the station manager had loaned. Sick to his stomach but he had no quit in him, not anymore. He shot another four that day and with each the memories peppered him like rain. Let them come. Let them soak him to the skin. It felt like a bloodletting, like leeching a poison from his veins. He deserved it, needed it, needed to remember so he could forget. There was a perverse catharsis in hunting, in claiming each death for himself.

  They let him train the horses eventually, once they realized he was more skilled at it than their own men. All kinds they bred here: stock horses and draft horses, those that would spend a life pulling coaches and buggies; even racehorses occasionally, if they had one they could stud. To the surprise of the others he was able to break the odd brumby, as his father had once done, coaxing them into obedience and watching for that change that came over them, the fear and madness fading from their eyes. And from his also: drink here was hard to come by, certainly anything stronger than beer, and somehow he didn’t miss it, didn’t feel the cloying need. He worked the horses until sundown, ate a meal with the others—quiet types mostly, reticent country men—then maybe read a book in the evening lying on his bed. He still had dreams occasionally. Noone laughing in the bloodied crater, Noone naked and arms-spread in the rain, Noone, Noone, Noone . . . but nobody asked him about it, nobody took the piss. They all carried demons in one form or another, or they wouldn’t have been here in the first place.

  He wrote to Arthur but the mail was sporadic: he never received a reply.

  In early ’97 he was forced to move on: drought was crippling the region, the horses would have to be sold. There wasn’t the work to keep him and he had no interest in hunting dingos again. It felt time to head for Adelaide anyway. He’d been putting it off this long. There was a direct road leading down there, the men told him, the Broken Hill road, roughly a week’s ride south through a hellish country of giant salt pans and desolate rubble plains, no water, no feed, he’d have to carry it all. He wouldn’t have seen anything like it, they warned him gravely; Tommy smiled and said they’d be surprised.

  On the fifth day out there he came across the mirage of a flotilla, a hundred white sailing boats dotted across the undulations and shimmering in the liquid haze. A township, he realized, not thirst playing tricks on his mind. The sails were canvas tents, empty, torn, unmoored, flapping loose on the wind; and here and there the skeletal frames of barns or other buildings stood like the salvaged hulls of stripped-down vessels in a shipyard. He drew closer. No movement, no sign of anyone else around. When the wind got up, the canvas rippled in a quickfire percussion; dust devils spun then disappeared. There were belongings in the tents, he noticed—a broken comb, an empty suitcase, things forgotten or left behind—and nearby each a small area had been pegged and often dug out, a warren of holes in the ground. It was a goldfield, picked dry then abandoned, the earth with nothing more to give. Carefully Tommy weaved between the claims, toward a struggling central waterhole whose feed-pipe suggested a bore. He didn’t notice the heads popping up around him, like moles out of the ground, as he dismounted and led the horses to the banks of the reservoir. The water looked dirty and brackish. He walked around to the bore pipe and tried the tap to see if it turned.

  “Scald you half to death if you drink it. You’ll want it cooled down first.”

  Tommy turned with his hand on his revolver. There were four of them, standing near his horses on the other side of the waterhole, filthy scarecrow men in a bizarre assemblage of ill-fitting clothing, adorned with hats and neckerchiefs, waistcoats and bow ties. Thin as the picks and shovels they carried, beards down to their chests. Three were white, the other native; one had a rifle on a shoulder strap, and they were too near the horses to risk a gunfight. Tommy let go of the revolver, allowed his hand to hang.

  “This all there is?” he called over.

  “For the horses, yeah. We can’t let it run or it floods. There’s barrels you can get a drink from though.”

  “Where?”

  The man squinted at him. “Y’ain’t planning on robbing us are you?”

  Tommy looked around. “What of?”

  “Water’s in that barn there,” the man said, pointing with his pick. “Trade if you have anything. Save you waiting on the bore.”

  Tommy told them he had tobacco, flour, dried mutton, and they exchanged excited glances like Father Christmas had just come. He unhooked his bladder bags and left the horses drinking from the reservoir and cautiously followed the men to the barn. There were others here, he realized. Perhaps a dozen men in all. He spotted them standing on distant hillsides, outlined in the sun, or leaning out of their hovels with their chins resting on their arms. Some place this he’d stumbled on. He’d top up his bladder bags, maybe share a meal, then leave.

  Outside the barn was a junkyard of furniture and wheelbarrows and bicycles and scrap; cash registers and bar taps and franking machines and weighing scales, all piled up or strewn loose on the ground. There were no doors on the building, only a cutout in the wall, and the roof was missing entirely—it rained so little they had no need. They led him inside, into a makeshift dwelling: there was a kitchen, a sleeping area, a rusted metal bathtub, a firepit, a blackened cooking stove. The man who’d done the talking so far showed Tommy a line of old beer kegs stacked against the wall, told him to have a try. Tommy turned one of the taps and clear water surged out. He tasted it: tepid but clean. “We got ourselves a trade, then? A meal for them bags filled?” the man asked, grinning. Tommy nodded and shook his filthy hand.

  A bearded prospector wearing a flowery housedress and going by the name of Keith prepared a stew out of the mutton and a few beans, and baked two fat loaves of bread. Nobody commented on his getup. Must have always dressed that way. In from the field they dribbled, this strange community of men, jabbering excitedly about Tommy’s arrival and whatever gold they’d scraped together that day. Most were white, of all kinds: German, Dutch, Australian mongrels like Tommy, plus another blackfella and two Chinese brothers, who only spoke between themselves. Tommy asked if their name was Song, the brothers from Bewley who’d gone to the goldfields and never come home. Of
course it wasn’t. He felt a fool for having wondered. In its heyday this place had swarmed with thousands of men, they told him, from all around the world, now this sorry handful were the only ones left. The field was all but dry, but they could just about make a living from it, and that was enough for them. Everything was communal. Sharing meant they survived. Most had tried moving on at one time or another, but this was all they knew. It wasn’t much but it was something, which was better than nothing at all, and that’s what awaited them out there. Rarely did anybody make it farther than Yunta, a day’s walk away, before turning round and heading back here, to take up their pick again.

  Tommy filled his bladder bags and left after the meal was over, as if whatever madness that afflicted these men might catch. They tried persuading him to stay longer; he should see the fun and games that went on after sundown. Music, dancing, drinking—no, he really shouldn’t, Tommy already knew that much. There was a chest of women’s clothing alongside a pair of fiddles and a foot drum, and he imagined Keith, and maybe the two Chinese brothers, getting dressed up in their glad rags and offering dances and maybe more—Tommy had spent enough time among lonely bushmen to imagine what might go on. He hitched the bladder bags onto his shoulder and backed out of the barn, his right hand free just in case. There was no need. The men followed him outside and waved him off like sweethearts on a train platform, and the sight of them lined up in front of the barn, big Keith in his housedress, the others like desperate vagabonds, had him chuckling all the way to Yunta, which he made by nightfall. He asked in the hotel about the goldfield. “Oh, those crazy fuckers are hell-bound,” the clerk told him. “The depravity they get up to—they eat people, so I’ve heard. It’s a wonder you got out alive.”

  He stabled the horses and took the train to Adelaide, looked in on Dee while he was there; she hugged him tightly and wouldn’t stop touching him, as if for proof he was real. Jack had been down last summer, she told him, explained what had happened; it would make his year knowing Tommy was getting by. “Don’t write him,” Tommy urged, and she laughed and said she wouldn’t dare, Jack wasn’t one for love letters in the mail. At the little table in the guesthouse kitchen they sat eating soup and warm bread and chatting about the old times, the good times, the people they had known, Dee working herself up to asking if Jack talked about her often, if he ever discussed his plans. Drought had closed the Birdsville Track, she had read in the newspaper, most of the other stock routes too; she was hoping he might settle down.