When Colts Ran (25 page)

Colts was skilled at interpreting what men told him in his line of work. This ram over that ewe. That wool beribboned over this. Prices, margins, futures, stockpiling, marketing. They were more than farm economics to the one who listened. They were the poetry of blokes in pursuit of souls twisted from ideal shapes never entirely lost under the hammer of the seasons. Alan Hooke said that only a sheep man could have such quiet, disconcerting wisdom, born of work in the yards that could only be called self-effacing compared with the galloping, loud manners of cattle men with their burst facial blood vessels from bug-eyed confrontations with horned bellowers.

A long-term game with Colts was whipping Randolph into impotent fury by adopting wayward enthusiasms Randolph couldn't relate to at all. Unusually for a sheep man Colts was the original bull terrier breeder on the Isabel. He'd borrowed the sire, Grabber, from Buckler.

There was a reason for this passing along of breeds: friendship. Colts felt for Alan Hooke, whose home acreage on the eastern edge of the Junction was besieged by town dogs allowed to stray. Hooke needed an animal more threatening than most in order to bail up owners and their dogs at the same time, to convincingly bellow he'd tear their bloody throats out if they didn't use a chain and protect his rams and Christmas pigs.

Colts bred from Grabber and gave Hooke the best of the litters – coincidentally when Hooke's first marriage, to that wild girl, Barbara, was breaking up, starting lone man with biter as a motif on the Isabel from the day Hooke walked home along the crown of the road and single mothers wished him good huntin' as they took bets on how long he would last without a woman in the house (not long).

Colts and Hooke liked getting into barking fights with clients, which agents needed to show they weren't creatures without self-respect, then turning around and swapping conspirators' grins while their dogs pawed each other and slobbered out by the fertiliser sacks and hay bales where their water dishes were.

Papa was the name of a dog Colts gave to Wolfie Keuper some years back. Low slung with muscular shoulders and a barrel-shaped body supported by wide, stumpy legs, every move Papa made parodied sexuality without any need for an opposite sex. Just material to plunge into would do, crouching over a trembling quarry with rheumy-eyed functionalism, planting seed in flesh and burying fangs in a pumping aorta.

The sole of Wolfie's shoe came away from the uppers flippety- flap as he nurtured his anger through the final burn-out. Papa was in a steel mesh yard at the back, servicing a bitch Melody, whose pups Wolfie gave to men with the same idea as his, which was to make a statement with their lives for once and for good and bloody all. The inheritance of Dunc Buckler via Colts spread into places Buckler never considered and a gone man stayed around barking.

That old VW still startled Colts every time he came around the corner. Its de-glassed headlamps caught the sun and bounced it away to wherever the next car wreck waited to pass it along. Wolfie left a perceptible trail, departing the district on a pushbike, muttering imprecations. It was some years since he was last sighted rootling about in a tidy bin, outside a doughnut shop in the city.

Yet even after all this time the VW looked as if a thumb on the starter and a foot on the gas would make it leap alive. Colts had the impulse to give it a try – why not, a man named Percy Perceval did so with a wrecked passenger bus and it fired. Percy marked the end of a succession of derro characters on Colts's list of callers, a merry, prattling man who made something positive and somehow musical out of the rhythms of a careless life.

That rainbow-painted twenty-eight-seater had come out along Perceval's road, slithered to the verges abandoned, and he got it going again, driving farther along the track, up through the peppermint forests on the southern slopes, through a cleft in the mountainside and into a clearing high above the coastal ranges that were wild as the Owen Stanleys, where Colts had posed with an Owen gun at nineteen for a photograph that he sent to Randolph, and Randolph had glued in his album where it still was.

Smoke drifted through a clearing at ground level, creating skeins of diaphanous grey. It reached into Colts's throat and tightened his bronchus. Percy Perceval was a charcoal burner. It seemed improbable when the old crafts were all gone. Somebody came and carted the sacks away to the city, where they were used in charcoal chicken shops. The wood ovens were dinosaur carapaces, curved sheets of iron set into the ground, smouldering. Percy worked hard at turning beautiful logs into chunks of pitch-darkness, retaining their beauty in whorls of grain and pressure elbows like photographic negatives. Of all the roads Colts took Veronica down in her old age, this one most attracted her.

On the trackside she collected finger-sized sticks of charcoal that she used for drawing on lavish spreads of paper. It was a country of wounded trees up there along the escarpment where Colts drove that woman, taking in the light.

The eucalypts had the colourings of salves and greases – rust, verdigris, zinc. Eucalyptus rossii was silver frosted, with light lifting the colour tones. Flushes of red, bunches of black, trunks pillaring from the shaly ground. Veronica pointed them out, showing Colts how to look closer, always closer without her explanations annoying him, as they had as a boy. So he looked. Possibly for the first time deeply. And she was gratified. She still had him, this man of carapaces who never wanted her to visit his house in Woodbox Gully.

*

Talk of men over the bartop the one night per week when Colts came in and worked for a few dollars was incessant with his friend Dalrymple, whose crop dusting was built on men's dreams more than most, on Dalrymple himself shedding the bonds of earth, serving graziers on the receiving end, men in love with fairy dust, i.e. superphosphate, raining down. In this respect old Oliver Dalrymple had been a dreamer only to a slighly more exaggerated extent than average, just to the level of being held in a straitjacket to quieten the worst of him with a hypodermic syringe.

‘All we are, are dreamers,' said Dalrymple, as a kind of benediction over his old man, which Colts denied in his practical life. But now he was silent.

‘Men's monologues are streams of photons spraying from personal spaceships spinning beyond the asteroid belt somewhere,' said Dalrymple.

‘You'd know,' Colts merely added.

Dalrymple was a talker. Forget the rules of society, wisdom chapping his cheeks like slipstream, he watched from the Five Alls and the best he could say was that a hot meat pie with gravy, peas, mashed potato and sliced carrot served as bar food through the paint-chipped kitchen hatch, along with a whisky's coppery shine, was the limit of the flame to which men owed existence.

Besides which, the Five Alls had a pull taking decisions out of a bloke's hands. A certain slant of the bar, a drum of footsteps not yours on the outside verandah, you were bound to follow. It made blokes smirk in recognition of their fate. You didn't have to live it to know it. Now whose old lady was this coming to give a bloke curry? It was Erica Molinari, Mrs Gilbert Dalrymple, coming into the bar as quietly and as softly as she was able, and after drinking a shandy taking the yammering Gil Dalrymple home.

Colts went along the counter with a Chux Superwipe, making it gleam.

Two men met at the Five Alls for the counter lunch every Friday, almost without fail. Colts came up from the agency and took his place at a dining table and someone brought their drinks. Their talk was gapped by long silences. Randolph never breasted the bar when he wanted another, as every other drinker did, but raised a finger for his fizzy gins (while Colts held to lemon squashes). Randolph was onto being a controlled drinker, having parted with AA. He maintained a fiction that the Five Alls was a hostelry with drink waiters, worthy of his high ideals. You could hear every word he said in the room. People listened.

‘I've been reading about courtesy titles. What do you know about them, Kings?'

‘Zilch. Nothing. Nought. Zero.'

‘Courtesy means manners of the court, civility, politeness, the refinement of the age. The courtesy title of the eldest son of a duke is marquis. Of a marquis is earl. Of an earl is viscount. Younger sons of dukes and marquises are styled lord followed by Christian name and surname.'

‘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.