When Colts Ran (33 page)

Coldness came on Claude Bonney like a river. Two in the morning and late, very late now, across the river and up the Flying Saucer Road, a ribbon of white dust in night-time paddocks bare as the moon. Here Tim Knox stopped to let UFOs sweep towards him over barbed-wire fences, their windows illuminated from within smearing into the watery constituents of light, showing rows of heads turned staring in his direction, he said. Then he said, putting rationality back into what he saw, ‘It was light, just light.'

Light was the wonder.

Bonney was fully awake now, warm bed in his mind, Jacquie making room for him, Bonney a stranger to her through his various tempers in a lifetime marriage but that to be made right.

*

On a back hollow before moonrise a rusted ute lurked, waiting. Three o'clock in the dead cold Isabel plateau morning. Minus eleven degrees and still. Drought cold, Antarctic valley deep. Dead rabbits and a small black wallaby draped on the tailgate, and Damon Pattison with a bumper glowing in a cupped hand thinking,
What's old Claude Bonney doing coming in so late, where's he been? Never known such an all-round, self-contained, do-it-yourself merchant. Always thinking. Working it out.

What if I hit him with the spot, parted a slug through his hair? Wouldn't that make him wonder? Jesus, would I laugh. And old Bonney, he'd piss his trousers.

Damon Pattison flipped his butt away into the frosty grass, where it fizzed.

Blaze of white light – OFU?

The shot ran through the night. As windscreen glass shattered, Bonney was stunned by a thought, the last he would ever have:
I'm on the receiving end.

It hasn't hurt yet, then it begins. The shock of it coming through in waves and waves and waves. Scrabble of claws running out the full length of a chain and never arriving. Just those poplars and fragments of fountains touching the stars.

NINETEEN

SPOT FIRES TRACKED ROADS LEAPING
towards ridgetop estates with tongues of flame pacing Major General Wayne Hovell's slowly moving car from kilometres away. Helicopters thudded in smoke, taking turns dropping water into crazed balls of heat and banking steeply off. At an arranged rendezvous an escort tanker appeared from a side road leading the car on, emergency lights flashing in the daylight dark. Three hundred metres altitude up from the railway line the Friendly House, restored to its greatness by Fred Donovan, burned to the ground.

Wearing a maroon beret tugged low on a weathered forehead, Wayne Hovell followed the tanker with the same quick attention he gave to everything in his late age, a bit careful on steep corners with smoke stinging his eyes but otherwise doing all right. At the last road barrier he unfolded himself from the Subaru like an intelligently designed but slightly rusted all-purpose pocketknife, and looked around for a known face.

They brought Damon Pattison forward, a cop at each elbow steering him up from a gully. Ever since Pattison's release after serving eight years of a twelve-year sentence, Hovell was the one called when the poor bugger's name appeared in police files cross-referenced to serial pests. If it hadn't been for a contact in the force there were three, maybe four occasions when Pattison's refusal to explain himself would have landed him in court for break and enter or arson – crimes inspired by the basic needs of food and warmth, it might be argued, but in Pattison's case no margin for excuses allowed as a lifer on early release.

An odd case, Pattison, having pleaded homicide when manslaughter was more the act he'd bungled when Claude Bonney was shot dead, a poor joke gone wrong – everyone seeing it, even the afternoon editors – all except the judge who underwrote Pattison's self-condemnation and gave him twelve years. After his time in the slammer he'd emerged a stubborn survivor with terminal unwillingness to explain himself, like a rock or a tree, just being in the world and resisting by nature. Bonney's widow and family wanted nothing to do with him, but he was still in character as an agent of fate and was just as bent on making amends as he'd been former bent. Just give him his chance.

After leaving the army Wayne Hovell had spent the next twenty years in public service – with the UN in Africa and then with natural disaster and firefighting coordination teams at home and interstate. He was called to Sydney from beach holidays almost every January and February as New South Wales either flash-flooded or burned. Supporting campaigns for the homeless, the vagrant, the outcast, the friendless and destitute without any fanfare, at least, that he generated himself, was Wayne Hovell's way. A few times each year he spoke from the pulpit of St Stephen's Uniting Church in Macquarie Street, giving the lunchtime sermon. Whatever the text, his theme came back to courage in action, how there was no giving without forsaking. ‘Renounce the Hidden', 2 Corinthians 4:2. It was something easier to encourage in others than to apply to himself. He was one of those finished products of a respected value system, the best a society could offer back to itself. What was his lack, then, his hidden? It was time at the age of eighty-three to bring it out.

Come Anzac Day Hovell marched with a breastful of ribbon at the head of a limping column. Defence planners and those he'd commanded sought him for guidance on the principle that anyone who'd commanded a platoon and a division had something worth saying on anything. Every three months meetings of the Lady Margaret Hovell Trust in an office high above Martin Place called for his judgement as money was portioned to community organisations fallen between government cutbacks and financial oblivion. A particular interest was prisoner rehabilitation but the net spread wider. On committee days Hovell quizzed investment advisers and chided his sons, in their fifties, about the contents of their portfolios and the degree of ethical consideration going into their share parcels – bluntly, never enough.

A late-flowering interest was art. Hovell attended painting appreciation classes encouraged by Tabitha, his wife, and developed that dimension of being, the privately intuitive, he'd underplayed in the name of the service-collective.

Since beginning prison visits a few years back Hovell thought that if the distorted energy Damon Pattison generated could be put to use the world might be a better place. This was after the example of Hovell himself, but so blindingly obviously so that he was for long years unaware of its origins in an episode of schoolboy bullying and the complex fractured jaw that jammed on him, sometimes hourly. That moment, sixty-eight years ago, awaited an act of redress for which Hovell's distinguished military career had been merely a diversion. It was no coincidence that Hovell's old quadrangle bully, Colts, had played a role in Pattison's teenage years but hardly decisive. When Pattison spoke of Colts, Hovell had the impulse to better Colts even yet: to break what was broken. It was a vengeful example of the shamefully hidden. But there you were.

Pattison's genius for trouble was astonishing in Hovell's view. Turn it around, face it the other way, what then? At the time the two met, soldier and inmate, Hovell was guest-lecturing at Staff College where he'd developed a few ideas crossing over from the field of battle into managing peace accords. He'd found his ultimate conflict resolution collaborator in the person of Normie Powell looking at competing tendencies in natural communities. Public Health: what a great category heading that was, symbolical of more than sewerage works and anti-malarial fog machines. It allowed viral opposites to join in the name of unforeseen solutions. There was no point kidding yourself dealing with rabbits when your subject was snakes, Normie liked saying. Then he illustrated the sadness factor by dropping off the map when best loved, most appreciated.

‘I've got a question for you, Damon,' said Hovell.

‘What's new?' grunted his passenger.

‘How'd you get into this particular scrape?'

Pattison held off answering while they drove through crossroads where people stood at their gates in weird yellow light, gazing north at smoke climbing into the stratosphere. The long ridge was once farmland, with the Friendly House used as a hayshed when it fell into ruin.

‘I was up the road, on the housing estate, helping a bloke who does garages. You get the slab in first, then Mike rolls up. You hold one end of a rod while Mike bolts the other. You look for the missing packet of screws – they come in plastic bags with numbers. I was up at the shops getting smokes, standing outside watching the Friendly House burn.'

‘That's all, Damon, just watching?'

‘I dropped a match.'

‘Intelligent,' Hovell sighed, unable to help himself.

‘A dead one,' Pattison said.

Hovell pictured Pattison, the self-appointed deus ex machina catching the eye of a watchful emergency worker or cop, flame feathering his fingertips – Pattison going to the edge of self-destruction on the wildest day of the year, extinguishing the provocation almost too late, only when it was interesting to do so by scraping backwards with a boot heel, perhaps.

‘You think I did it. Why'd I go and do a thing like that? Stuff a few leaves up their drainpipe, break a window, let the sparks fly in on all them beautiful Veronica Buckler originals gone up in smoke.'

There'd been a Buckler Retrospective in the restored Friendly House. It had opened a month before the fires.

‘I know one that's safe,' said Hovell. He swallowed, picturing the gawky truth of his appearance. ‘It's called
The Chook
.'

Tabitha had bubble-wrapped
The Chook
, sending it off to the National Portrait Gallery, an exhibition on loan from various sources (‘Those Who Made Us').

‘That makes two,' said Pattison, surprising Hovell with his information. ‘Two that's safe.'

Being wise to never pushing, Hovell said nothing but waited to be told. He sensed a change in Pattison equivalent to something Hovell often hoped for, it came about in men, God alone knew how.

They turned off the main road heading south. Pattison rolled down the window, inhaling thinning smoke. ‘Next stop Isabel Junction,' he said.

Last time from the St Stephen's pulpit Hovell looked into the scattered congregation and saw Pattison trying not to draw attention to himself by sitting in the back pew. Grizzled head bent, grubby hands steepled and covering his eyes like a small, vulnerable yet hopeful child's bedtime petition.
I can help you
, decided Hovell.
You shall allow it.

Now it felt like the other way around as Pattison angled in his seat, staring at Hovell from the side. He'd seen Hovell palming tablets into his mouth, swigging on water. Via peripheral vision Hovell looked back at the mat of orange whiskers and the glint of saliva on cracked lips – leave to the imagination the sullen weight of Pattison's reproachful, mudfish eyes.

‘You're skinnier than you were, John Wayne.'

‘I don't think so.'

‘You're sick, you're crook – and you still pester me.'

This was a kind of praise.

‘Everyone's on medication at my age, Damon. It's a given.'

‘I've got a question.'

‘That makes a change,' said the old man.

‘You'll say yes?'

Hovell adjusted his grip on the wheel.

‘I mean you'll have to,' said Pattison, betraying uncertainty for once.

‘Is it about me?' Hovell asked.

‘You're so bloody good, what's your problem.'

‘Spit it out, then.'

‘This car's got a roof rack,' he reached a hand up, feeling the fittings.

‘Surprise me with what you mean,' said Hovell.

‘It's that painting –
Goats
,' said Pattison. ‘I was a complete arsehole, don't ask me why, and Colts bought our house for us. Saved my mum's life. Used his last dollar and sold
Goats
to a bastard of a man, Ted Merrington, who let his son Harald serve time for him in Goulburn Gaol.'

‘The goat meant tragedy in ancient Greece,' said Hovell. ‘In Ireland a goat king was crowned every year. When I was there I heard of a goat being caught in Ulster and stopped from being taken south.'

‘I want to do something for him,' said Pattison. ‘For Kingsley Colts.'

This answered a prayer for Pattison's wellbeing that Hovell had made, but only in a certain direction. ‘Lord,' he said to himself, ‘does it have to be Colts?'

They drove along humpbacked gravel roads where the air thinned with increasing altitude and tussock grasses bloomed insect hordes in the late-afternoon light. Pattison directed the way while Hovell's thoughts bore down on the next few days of his life. He could do without this diversion. A decision needed to be made on the purchasing policy of the small but useful lending library in a backroom of the old goldmining township where he and Tabitha raised Belted Galloways and kept bees. A fishing holiday in Alaska involving float plane connections needed finalising – it would be his last. Visits to grandchildren and great-grandchildren were called for – he'd made those a strong habit this year. The kids loved him for the presents he gave and for the interest he showed in whatever was happening in their lives, from a problem in recorder class with the youngest to an act of drug-using self-destructiveness with an older one. Hovell withheld judgement and was loved with devotion that was to remain a gift in the lives of those kids for a good long time. Light shone through his pink blood-vesselled cheeks like a torch held under a blanket recalling the deepest and most secure childhood moments.

Colts wasn't good in the mornings but by dusk he was all right, tootling along with his fox terrier, Pat, angling the square blocks of the Junction on a favourite walk, banging up to the Five Alls to surprise himself with a nip.

The bar crowd was mostly kids new out of school, tattooed, singleted, bottle-blonded boys and girls, some of them calling Colts Kings or Old Kings to show they were in the know about a legendary old fart. ‘Good on ya, Kings, have one on us . . .' Buying Colts a snort was like throwing a dog a bone, no trouble. Girls said Pat was so sweet they could eat her alive as they nuzzled her wet nose.

Colts went through the Five Alls and came out the other side pleasantly cheery, only reeking a little of brandy fumes. Last week, finding him stinking-trousered in Pioneers Park under a photinia bush, Randolph had nudged Colts with the tip of his walking stick when he would rather have struck him.

Down the main street greeting strangers with a blurred smile and peering through the smudged glass of the bakery, Colts spotted, between the community notices taped to the window, a man around his own age buying pies.

Didn't like what he saw – a stirring of resentment as he picked the beret-wearer as the superior sort of traveller favouring the Isabel now, history-hopping as they expressed it and feeding from a crushed paper bag. A high court judge or retired governor with that casually cultivated tweedy look, so condescending to failure of the self-willed sort.

From a car Colts was watched in turn.

‘There he goes,' said Pattison, hunching down in the passenger seat of the Subaru.

Then it was Hovell's turn, with a surge of revulsion towards a man he thoroughly knew, as part of his bite, swallow and lifelong mechanism of expression: Colts. The sight of that flushed skeleton shook him, that doddery shadow enacting a ghost wish:
He's kneeling as I come up behind him with the offer of a tyre lever, and then, as he knows me, I bring the bar down.

‘Let's get out of here,' said Hovell, dumping the baked goods in Pattison's lap.

Just out of town Hovell apologised and stopped the car, getting the door open even before it rolled to a halt. There to his burning-throated humiliation he barfed his guts out into a bush, wiping his mouth and looking around guardedly, blaming his oncologist for prescribing a stronger dose of cisplatinum.