How I Became the Mr. Big of People Smuggling (8 page)

‘Son, if you stay the six months, that gets you to the bonus, well worth it, Son. I know you're only up here for the cash so it would be silly to pass up the chance of the bonus.' He was sort of right, and then there was the wet, another muster, another year gone by.

‘I look after my people, but if they don't want, well, what can you do. You just gotta let them go.'

Had he found the stuff? I was trying to form words, wondering whether to deny that I had planned to leave without telling him, but he didn't seem to want me to talk and I think he was saying something but I couldn't hear anything but the rush of blood in my ears. We were approaching the road and beyond that the track up to the pit and the rifle was sitting there on the dash as it always was
and perhaps as we slowed for the corner I could grab the gun and run. I tried to still my breathing, calm my heartbeat.

I was much younger than him. I could move a whole lot faster. If I jumped as we turned to the right I could roll with the momentum and grab the gun as I went. I'd be out before he moved. I moved my hand onto the door handle, but instead of turning he stopped at the road, left the engine running and sat looking straight ahead.

‘Out ya get. Off you go, don't come back until you're ready to be on the team.'

Dumbly, numb, and without grabbing the gun I got out. He wouldn't do it here on the road, but just in case, I stood back a bit, behind the door pillar where I could see him but he would have to turn to see me. He simply drove off, away up the road as if he had dropped me at the highway to catch a bus. I watched dumbfounded as the van sped off and I hadn't moved when it slowed, turned around, and gathered speed as it came back towards me. I felt hunted. Was he playing with me? Was he going to run me down or worse, was he going to shoot at me for some sporting fun?

I ran. I took off into the desert as quickly as I could across the soft sand and tried to put some scrub between me and him. I heard the van continue up the road. I kept running, jogging, fearful he might come back. I ran from the road until suddenly I was on the long downhill that leads towards the pit. I would have heard the van if he'd come along that way, but even so I turned and jogged to my left, parallel to the road, until I could jog no more. I walked. I meandered, at first towards the pit where I knew that eventually someone would come when they did a rubbish run, and then away, deeper into the desert, because it might have been Palmenter who came. I collapsed near a tree and cried. I moved closer to the highway, close enough to hear any cars. I hid as best I could. It was too far for me to walk anywhere but back to the station. Perhaps a car would come.

During the day I burned in the sun. I had no hat and the tree offered little shade. I had nothing with me. No money. None of my stuff. I had no water, no food, nothing other than what I had been wearing when he said come for a drive. I spent two freezing desert nights and then walked to the station. Of course he knew and I knew that no cars would come and that the only thing for me to do was walk back to the homestead. I went straight to the water tower and gulped cool water and splashed it over my aching head and blistered skin. I saw him watching me from the homestead verandah. Bastard, I thought. I went to my room and lay down, I wanted to cry but couldn't. I couldn't stop shaking. The moment I began to feel just a little under control that terror would come back. Of being out in front of a loaded gun, of being unknown, alone, insignificant and invisible to the world but enormous in the great wide land full from horizon to horizon of nothing but that bullet with my name on it.

I thought of Arif and his body out there, that there was no one to miss him, and then I thought of my family. Why hadn't they replied to my letters? Because, stupid, he never posted them.

Maybe my father or Simon would come looking for me. How many years would have to go by? When I left home I hadn't given an address because all I knew was it was a place called Wingate Station. But they could find it. You can't hide ten thousand square kilometers of land. But the name had been changed, and I had been told to ask at the roadhouse and suddenly I realised that the roadhouse must be in on it somehow.

‘Wingate Station?' At the roadhouse when I asked, the manager had wandered to the door and checked out my van. Satisfied, he
continued, ‘Yeah, mate. That's Palmenter's place now,' and he gave me directions.

How much was the roadhouse a part of it? Probably only enough to let Palmenter know if anyone ever came asking. He must have known the police were coming that time, that was why they waited for him as he walked casually over to their car. Maybe the roadhouse only did it to keep the lucrative avgas contract and didn't know much else, but I felt sure if someone turned up asking for directions to Wingate Station Palmenter would get to hear about it well before any maps to Palmenter Station were handed out.

I must have become delirious because I remember hearing my father talking to me. He told me he was driving up to find me. He was going to confront Palmenter. And then there was a fight, my father and Palmenter outside my room, and my father was being beaten, but I was at school again, caught in the classroom at lunchtime and it was not my father and Palmenter but me and Dan Taylor and Dan tripped me and I fell, and there was no Dan, I was walking, stumbling, alone in the scrub, and my father told me again he was looking for me, and in all that I realised my father was exactly like me, he would no more confront Palmenter than I would. I cried. I went to sleep crying because I was just like my father and as I cried, in my self-pity, I understood what the recruitment agent had seen. That I was the perfect candidate for this job.

Cookie brought me something to eat later. He tapped gently at the door and came in.

‘Thought you might be hungry.' He set a fresh roll with salad and meats on my dresser and waited, apologetically.

With the fresh bread smell I was suddenly ravenous. As I ate I wondered if my fuel stash was safe. Between mouthfuls I asked.

‘One of your containers leaked. He smelt it. Came into the kitchen in a fury, saw the food I had packaged up for you.' Cookie seemed to wish I had got away with it. ‘Sorry mate.'

‘Not your fault.' I ate some more. ‘You know what's going on. Can't you leave? Why do you stay? Maybe if we all left.'

Cookie didn't answer right away. He took out some leaf and concentrated on rolling a joint.

‘Some of my finest. You probably need one of these and I'm just the person to share it with.' He was that. Cookie the space cadet. Was he a part of it all? Was it for the drugs that he stayed or were they simply how he coped?

‘Spanner and I were here before he was. It was okay then. Still can be okay, y'know, if you just keep to yourself, don't get involved in the shit. Here we got freedom you don't get most places, wide open space, clean air, no one to hassle you. At some point you gotta give up caring about the rest of the world anyway, might as well be before you die.' He made a little gesture of smoking the joint that he hadn't yet lit. ‘I know, I know, I smoke too much of the ganja but when it comes down to it, what else is life? What else is there?'

It was the longest and most coherent speech I had ever heard from him. Indeed, what else was there?

‘Girls,' I suggested. ‘And travel, people, art, music, culture, restaurants.'

‘There is that. But what else? What is there that is important?'

‘That is all important.'

He shrugged. ‘Maybe.'

He lit the joint and took a long toke then passed it to me.

‘Thing is I don't disagree with any of it. Give people a chance, these people have nothing, have nowhere to go. He's a bastard and a bully and an arsehole but, hey?' He shrugged again.

The dope was strong. I closed my eyes for a moment before I handed the joint back to him and watched the end glow as he drew on it. He closed his eyes and tilted his head back.

‘If you want to leave you'll have to be a bit clever about it. He's totally paranoid someone is going to talk, dob him in.'

I watched Cookie, motionless except for the subtle roll of his wrist to prevent ash falling. His eyes were still closed.

‘But he can't make people stay. He can't keep me here as a prisoner for the rest of my life. You can't give freedom to some people if it means imprisoning others. He...' I was about to tell Cookie about Arif, but I didn't. ‘I feel like I am trapped here until he decides I can go.'

‘Walls are in your head, mate.'

‘Bullshit. If there are no walls, why do you smoke so much shit?'

He considered that. He looked at the joint in his hand, thought
for a while then relit it, took a long drag and held his breath. As he let it out he leaned back. ‘I'm just putting windows in the walls in my head.'

But I knew he agreed with me. We were two prisoners discussing the outside world and the walls were a thousand kilometres of desert and scrub and land only a nomad could live in.

‘Don't you think we have a duty to ourselves to always strive, to fight to escape whatever it is that holds us and that this is all the more imperative when we find ourselves in a situation we don't agree with,' I said, rather than asked.

Bullshit, I thought. I had walked from the road to here, right back into the situation I didn't agree with rather than die in the struggle to escape.

‘We are all trapped on planet Earth. Do you check out if you don't like it?' he asked.

‘I notice you check out most of the time.' I couldn't help myself, but then added, to make it less of an accusation, ‘Philosophers trapped in their mortal coils.'

‘That's deep shit that is,' he said.

He passed the joint to me again and I drew on it slowly and deeply. Bloody drug-addled, brain-dead idiot, I thought. Me too, I wished. You had to like Cookie. He was harmless and kind-hearted and he had a good laugh, always saw the funny side of things. He had brought me food. But he would never amount to anything. Why did that matter?

‘So how come you stay here? What was it like here before?'

‘It was a proper cattle station. Called Wingate. Went broke. Run by the McArthur family, you woulda read about it. South Pacific Pastoral Company. They went belly-up and all the stations were sold off and Palmenter bought this one. This is the last cattle station in this area, all the rest been turned into national park or private nature reserves. Run tourists instead of cattle.'

I began to laugh. Something about that seemed funny. He relit the joint and we passed it between us a few more times.

‘We sort of run tourists,' I said.

He laughed.

‘Yeah. Tourists. You have to admire them. Their guts. To leave their home and all their friends, all that is familiar. To make a better
life. Meanwhile...' he waved his arms to encompass the room, the homestead, the station and himself.

He leaned back and closed his eyes as if exhausted by the effort of speaking and I thought how some of our most lucid thoughts are immediately before we go to sleep. He was right and had obviously thought about this before, and I wanted him to keep going but I couldn't think what to say. The dope was strong and it might have been some time before we began talking again. We might have both dozed for a while and someone coming into the room would have seen two grinning dimwits incapable of clear thought.

‘I stayed on as cook,' he said, answering my question from a while ago. ‘Spanner too, although his missus didn't last too long, she took off after a year or so.'

‘Spanner is married?'

He considered the question slowly. Was it his speech or my hearing that was slurring?

‘I guess so. No, I don't think they was married. They was just travelling around together, picking up work here and there. They had been over on the mines, decided it was time to see something else. He and his missus came only about six months before the place was sold. I guess he likes it. He's all right, is Spanner.'

I suppose it shouldn't have come as such a shock that there would have been a woman in Spanner's life. He was self-contained and content in a way and I had only ever known him like this, but why not? As Cookie spoke I pictured Spanner and his woman, the two of them. She would have the same laconic outlook. Whatever happened to her probably didn't involve Palmenter because Spanner didn't seem to hold any strong hatred for Palmenter. He drank, all day and slowly, not the fast and fall-down drinking of the muster crew. It was the same as Cookie who smoked and drugged himself daily as if to avoid thinking about his discontent. Cookie smoked to escape and Spanner drank to escape. I need a hobby, I thought.

Cookie told me about how the place was under the former owners and how when Palmenter first arrived nothing much changed. There were a lot more workers, all the muster and cattle crew were on staff and lived at the homestead. Often the dongas were full because as well as the staff there were frequent visits from other stations, or they would all have a few days off and go the few
hundred kilometres to have a rodeo with the neighbouring station. One by one they closed down and were taken over by Parks and Wildlife and let back to nature. Now, apart from the rare lost tourist, no one ever came out this way.

‘Do you think Palmenter bought it with what he is doing in mind?'

‘Who knows? I think we all, him included, just little by little get into things. Like boiling frogs, you know.'

I knew what he was referring to, about that thing that they say if you put frogs into cold water and then slowly heat it they won't get out because they don't notice the temperature rising and eventually you boil them alive. The way he said it was as if he had done it, as if he was talking about how to make hard-boiled eggs and I couldn't get the thought out of my head of Cookie boiling up some frogs and serving them to us for dinner. I thought he was capable of it when he was all herbed up. Then I thought instead of frogs he'd boil up cane toads and serve us and we'd all die like one of those strange religious cults. At least it would get rid of vermin, I thought, and couldn't decide if toads or humans were the vermin. I started laughing again and soon we were both lying back on the bed giggling. None of it was important.

‘Sometimes I feel sorry for Palmenter,' he said after a long silence.

‘He's an arsehole.'

Cookie laughed. ‘You're right. He's an arsehole.'

And we were both laughing as if that was riotously funny. Palmenter had driven me out to the road and left me. He knew no one would come along, he knew I would walk back to camp or if I didn't, I would perish out there. How did he know I wouldn't decide to walk, struggle for a few days along the road until I had gone too far to turn back, was too far gone? I would have died out there and he didn't care. No one but he knew I was out there. Would he have come to get me in a few days? How many days would he wait? I'd spent two days hiding under a spindly tree near the road and there had been no cars. He hadn't come back. No, he was prepared to have me die out there and I was sure he would not even come to get my body. I wouldn't even get the careless burial those five blokes got. Birds and dingoes and insects would gnaw at me until I was nothing but sun-bleached scattered bones or, if my body were found, he would say I was some foolish city boy who knew no better. By walking
back I had accepted the inevitable, his ultimatum, my entrapment. I didn't want to die and so I had agreed to his conditions. He held total power over me. And here were Cookie and I laughing ourselves silly over it.

Simms was given the job of the bore runs permanently and these were done far less often. At muster time, I was put with one of the truck crew, someone I was sure was a spy for Palmenter. Other times, I was left to my duties around the camp, the garden and my small room on the verandah.

I kept my head down and got back to work. It must have been weeks later that Palmenter said something to me, it might even have been the first thing he said to me after that time. He said I seemed to be getting on a bit better, and that maybe I could start to play a more important role.

‘I need people I can trust around here, Son, because I can't be here all the time. There is a lot to organise in the business. Perhaps you could think about taking on a bit more responsibility.'

I said yes, I was ready for that. I agreed, but not so enthusiastically as to arouse suspicion, because not only did I have the sense it was in fact a sort of threat in the same way that he had said I was free to leave when he left me out at the road, I was also thinking that here was my chance to find another way out. I would have to be careful. He had shot Arif in front of me in cold blood and I knew that I would be next if I got caught a second time.