When Colts Ran (5 page)

Veronica was about to say there wasn't a man, but bowed towards Colts.

The woman began clambering down even as the horses heaved to a stop.

‘Let me introduce myself,' said Veronica, foolishly formal.

The other only grinned.

Colts backed off, sensing it was him involved in the matter of introductions.

The old dame advanced in the mud, weaving the flaps of her coat and driving him as far as Veronica's smouldering fire.

‘A shrewd little ken all, ken little?'

He laughed exaggeratedly, the way he did when an unfair accusation was made, which always had truth in it.

She extended a mottled pink hairless arm, thick as a joint of pumped mutton.

Colts stood fast; she meant to give him a game of knuckles. ‘All right, missus,' he said, ‘don't lose your wool' – and held his breath against the ammonia goat pong. As he pressed his fist against hers, shaping up, she splayed her fingers to baulk him, and he suddenly drew back.

‘My strike,' she said, spittle frying on her lips, and rained blows that caused the fine bones along the back of Colts's hand to burn and swell.

For an old lump she was quick, rocking on small feet, well balanced. He wouldn't like to be the goat she held against the killing knife, backed to a fence, blood and hairs on her coat.

Veronica intervened impotently, ‘Stop this, really, I say there, what's in it?'

‘A guid game never goes astray,' said the woman. ‘The lady poets of Greece focht aye the foremost in their birthday suits.'

‘Is that the Scots' accent I detect there, Mrs . . . ?' said Veronica a little bit gaily.

‘Lizzie Walker, I have no mon's name.'

Spoken as if we're supposed to know her
, thought Veronica, as Colts looked on from under his hat, nursing his carpal bones, surliness changing to a leer. To be famous in this country you only had to live there.

Somehow the three of them and the two horses dragged the motorbike from the mud. Veronica caught the giggles, Colts frowning at her. A man must be stern. They unbolted the sidecar and using ropes raised the bike in pieces to the back tray of the wagon and set off walking, the horses hauling in the dusk. It was not altogether understood, but slowly an impression was gained, that Lizzie Walker regarded the bike as salvage, a rightful prize.

Turning south following the goats they found elevated sandy ground just on dusk. Goats circled, firing pellets of black dung as the woman hopped around finding a nanny to milk. Colts collected sticks for a cooking fire. It was buck stew and not bad either.

Lizzie Walker raised a square bottle to the firelight after pouring a splash into her guests' mugs. She stirred the pot and spoke of her life. There had been men, but they couldn't hold her.

‘The one was dim as a post from taking blows to the head. The other had fingertips like pebbles from pushing needles through leather. The drover, Bulleen, whose wee cat this was –'

‘Cart?'

‘Fezackerly. He was guid tae me but loved his stock more. A butcher mon had a way of twisting an animal's neck until it fell to the ground. Knew his way round bones and drank till his liver went phut. There was the bootmaker, he carried the clap. Curry, I gave a well-known jockey, mon burped like a frog, stank of bad teeth and was puir in the stomach unless he rode. Luton – should I mention names? Luton's hams were like a grasshopper's drumsticks from operatin' the pedal radio on guvvermint outposts and chasin' gins. See what's ahead of ye, laddie, if ye'd be a mon. See what ye're bound for, what ye'll be?'

Lizzie Walker was travelling hurt through a band of poor soil called Australia. It lent itself to that.

They reached the rail line at last, where a carriage served as the schoolhouse. The teacher's residence was a second carriage on termite-proof blocks under the bare sun. A few tin huts with canvas awnings ached with loneliness, slapping in the oven-wind, clinging to the edges of the iron tracks with desperate closeness. A boy and a girl, twisted with shyness, watched.

Lizzie Walker tramped along the railbed scavenging bottles thrown from trains and gathering papers blown from the railway camp. Her goats gambolled under an overhead water tank where there was a nibble of green pick.

‘Puir railway children. They learn to put miles between them.'

Awaiting the train, Veronica had last words with the goat woman while Colts sat on the siding with the bags they'd sorted from their lot. It was a simple transaction without stated reason. Veronica stood upwind from her as they haggled it out. Then she rejoined Colts.

‘How much did you get?' he asked, acting as if every oil-stained lump of metal Buckler ever kissed was tagged for his unique inheritance. ‘You just let it go,' he accused her.

All Colts had was a blanket roll and a billycan like a swagman born to the track. Veronica hadn't much more. The boy's boots on laces hung around his neck, bumped against his ribs as he paced the siding, keeping clear of Veronica, looking for a smudge of engine smoke to the east that would take them farther west. He'd had enough of her and found a plank of shade, squatted and closed his eyes.

THREE

DUNC BUCKLER HAD TWO MAPS
, one with place names and the other cross-coded with numbers. ‘Use the first for bum fodder if we get sprung,' he instructed Jack Slim, his corporal.

‘Shouldn't we just swallow it?' said Slim.

‘First Jap we see, you start, Corp. Masticate into spit balls. Force 'em down. That's an order.'

They drove to places Buckler knew and the officer took tea with owners while Slim poked around sheds and listed machinery. Meantime Private Abe, their factotum, cadged them a boiling fowl or half a sheep, sometimes a wild duck on a scummy reach of station tank. Rabbits were plentiful with their small bones and stringy flesh, and just for variety's sake a haunch of dark-meated kangaroo might be spared from the dogs.

Buckler kicked tyres, made assessments of national value and recited the law of requisition to be applied in circumstances unpredictable but hasty if the Jap took the north. Such grandiose sheep stations they were – soil blown stripped, property names sand-blasted from galvanised iron sheets wired between posts on red sand tracks set back from rutted roads: Wonder Downs, Lily of the Valley, Hope View. A collection of tin sheds, the kitchens a bed of ashes.

In a high-stalking Chevrolet wagon crossing Australia slantwise, Buckler and his duo emerged from grey saltbush country into red sand mulga country, into broken golden downs of spinifex with purple ranges on the skyline.

They camped in dry creekbeds burning red gum logs, from which spiders and foxes, lizards, red-bellied black snakes, native cats and ground-nesting swallows emerged on the run. The road through the ranges revealed station after isolated station, the homesteads looking whole from a distance being built of stone, empty-eyed when the Blitz lurched closer, abandoned as the region returned to desert. An inventory was accumulated worthy of the industrial revolution: boilers, mine batteries, pumping engines, electric and motorised contraptions of many sorts. Stranded tide-wrack from a generation of defeated hopes, Buckler's own included?

He wouldn't say that.

It felt almost halfway across the continent to Jack Slim and somewhere short of no-place to Abe, who relished the going in his lip-smacking foreigner's way. Buckler believed the big Commonwealth offered such reffos the biblical factor, a parable of existence's last stab to the philosophical brain.

‘We haven't even started yet,' promised Buckler, wiping his mouth with a kind of turbulent delight while his pair of six-bob-a-day tourists gaped. When the new moon dangling the evening star came up, his Byron rang:

The angels all were singing out of tune, And hoarse with having little else to do, Excepting to wind up the sun and moon, Or curb a runaway young star or two . . .

And promptly Slim gave the next few lines, chapter and verse:

Or wild colt of a comet, which too soon Broke out of bounds o'er th' ethereal blue, Splitting some planet with its playful tail, As boats are sometimes by a wanton whale.

Buckler couldn't keep anything from Slim. Veronica, damn her knowledge, and Colts kicked out of school were on Buckler's trail – the news in a letter dust-lined in his kit, forwarded from Brigade HQ and carried by the mailman until their paths crossed, he'd talked of it drunkenly while thrashing arguments with Slim. Women and children in the camp. History's tares and tatters.

Across the artesian basin, when they came to a steaming bore drain, Buckler declared a bogey, the bush bath and shave. They splashed in cattle troughs with bars of soap and face washers, Slim playing a boy's game – blocking the overflow and diverting it through the sand. Buckler left him for hours while he modelled canals, rivers and dams, singing and lost to himself on all fours with his balls dangling from his army shorts like a dog's.

‘I've owned up to another kid,' supposed Buckler, who liked Jack Slim though couldn't get the measure of him exactly. Agreeable, jokey, smart-hitting the way they turned them out from Sydney University, which was to say with the shininess brought up, buffed with civilisation and then smudged a little in the colonial style. He worried that Slim was a card-carrying commo, but made allowances for youth and education – Slim telling about being kicked from school early, a time of hardship on the wallaby track before he studied at night and won a teaching scholarship. They were open with each other based on affectionate sincerity. On grounds of pinko conscience Slim believed it was all right to defend Australian soil, but as for expeditionary forces of the kind Buckler craved, forget them.

Up the back of the Blitz buggy they carted pots and pans, surveyors' pegs and crates of infernal tinned meat. They had bags of dried peas and a sack of Eyre Peninsula wheat, which Buckler sprouted with the exactitude of an agricultural ace. A winch and short-handled spades and a fury of digging got them out when they bogged in sand. There was always the stink of fuel drums, which Buckler twitched over draining, saving what they had, refilling the drums from station stores and leaving a voucher in promise. Under a blacksmith's shed he bolted a blade on the front with an arrangement of hinges, converting the truck into a push-puller able to clear the country of sticks, as he liked to say, boasting they might navigate the contraption on the diagonal, the full width of the continent if they pleased.

To which Slim said, ‘It's never been done, except by Afghans on camels and by long-distance blackies carrying message sticks.'

‘Don't try me.'

Slim strung an aerial between trees and they contacted HQ, reporting in code to their brigadier.

‘That code name, Scorched Earth, dunno why, it fills me with hope,' said Buckler.

‘You seem to mean that,' observed Slim, whose hobby on the track was working Buckler out. Their orders were to make an inventory of tools, motors, fuel in sealed drums and whatever they thought, when it came to it, useful if the army was forced to retreat on short rations through the arid zone, picking what it could from the skeleton of the land it called its own.

In the early weeks, when they'd first started, Slim saw the mailman hand over a packet of letters and Buckler bringing them to his nose, perfume-wafting-wise.

‘Something sentimental going on,' Slim deduced, ‘in the old father's trousers.'

Yes, Buckler was hooked. There was power in a name he couldn't help uttering: ‘Rusty Donovan, I call her Red.' A great big idiot, he sighed over talismanic hieroglyphs – misspellings, ill-educated blots and scratches, the veined creekbeds of pressed rose petals.

Those were the times when away from the hullabaloo Buckler stumbled on something so beautiful it stunned him to humility – ‘Men, come and look!' – a striped rock, a desert hakea blooming, the skin of a snake. His mind coiled round that Rusty Donovan and back at the camp he reached for his pen. A young married woman, her husband a violent man, Buckler had taken his chances.

Two weeks later they crossed paths with Charlie, the mailman, and Buckler looked sour. She'd thanked him for his trouble, prompt but hardly effusive like once upon a time, when she loved love.

But Buckler went on – hammering away at his heart, or was it his balls, in the instance of Rusty Donovan, formerly Mrs Hoppy Harris, formerly of Broken Hill, now of Adelaide.

A red track emerged from scattered bush either side of a T-junction heaped with windblown sand. The gaunt, burnt branches of a tree marked the spot with a piece of tin hanging from a length of wire. Buckler had been there years before heading west for a rendezvous with work and stamped his initials and the date, with latitude and longitude references exact, on the lid of an old kerosene drum and hung it up. The whole lot was still there, smoothly rusted and creaking like a gallows.

The jolting truck declared a fuel problem and choked to a stop. While Buckler bled fuel lines looking for the blockage, his pair crawled under the tailgate and snored.

Kangaroos in the heat of day as they raised their snouts were like shadowed human observers. They angled from the lying position and showed their perversely watchful faces. Then, in the same hypnotising way – right there on the track to nowhere – certain individuals emerged from the mass of land. A breeze kept the sound of a second vehicle to a murmur until dust made it obvious two miles away.

‘Who's that?' said Slim, cranked up on an elbow.

‘Must be someone,' said Buckler, shading his eyes to see the plume of an approaching transport.

An American Blitz wagon like their own but carrying a dozen men and boys stopped a short way off.

‘I don't believe it,' said Buckler.

The young, slouch-hatted blackfellows were half-dressed in singlets and khaki shorts, toes hanging over the tailgate. Their leader, tantalising with native diplomacy, allowed a minute to elapse with the engine switched off before he stepped down. Then Buckler recognised him: the nuggety old soldier, Adrian de Grey, wearing corporal's stripes and in charge of a construction detail.

‘Last place I'd expect to find a legend,' said de Grey when he eyed Buckler over.

‘Ditto,' said Buckler, offering his hand.

In crisp army style de Grey ordered his boys to make camp and they jumped to the job.

That evening as the sun boiled into redness and the rickety shadows of mulga lengthened over a purpling plain, Buckler stalked imagined boundaries in his well-oiled and ferociously dusty boots. Away from the crossroads there was no edge. There were webs holding yellow coral-backed spiders in suspension between thorn bushes. There were dingo howls and shooting stars. In the coming dark he fancied meeting a man eye to eye and engaging him hand to hand, gristle to bone, clasp knife to scrotal sac. Slim worked it all out. The returned man's festering drive, the fascist solution of one and one, the disinclination to share what had been rhetorically bought by blood for the sake of the all. Knowing Buckler's attitudes, Slim didn't have to ask what de Grey was doing out this far on a mustering camp of Eureka. He said they were roo shooting away from their main camp but there was a definite impression of a meeting being sought. De Grey would be wanting to know what Buckler's troublemaking propensities were, around this unit he'd put together with pride and wariness of acceptance of colour.

Buckler came down the line and saw de Grey's boys turning away from him. So de Grey had said something about Buckler to his team, that he hated blacks.

That night, pressure lamps hissing, there were two camps under the stars. Abe cooked for both. Buckler looked over at de Grey's lot as they slurped on mulligatawny soup and chewed fresh damper from the camp oven. Dehydrated vegetables were served, mashed dried peas and sauerkraut, and a fatty cold mutton they hungrily eyed when Abe unwrapped it from a sugar bag and flourished his carving blade.

By the light of the camp fire Buckler gave de Grey a pointer on the nutritional shortcomings of his race: ‘Abe is correcting it with his grub.'

De Grey curtly thanked him and went off into the dark to find his swag.

‘Suit y'self, digger,' Buckler mumbled into his cocoa.

He worked on irritation, eyes sweeping the dark following infantry patrol routines unpractised in a while. Blow on certain resentments. Keep them bright. Watch men who moved as shadows. De Grey's band was rather too Australian for Buckler's taste, taking too much for granted. Look how de Grey came in from nowhere, he griped to Slim, his transport loaded with mere boys holding army-issue Lee Enfields. Buckler recalled de Grey's words back on the troopship
Taranaki
in '19, a pique against land taken without kindness from native inhabitants. De Grey already had his place in history, gloriously rained on him at Dernancourt and Villers-Bret. What more did he want? ‘But the man's a fucking marvel,' Buckler conceded.

A cowboy song with a plaintive kick could be heard from de Grey's camp. It came with an eerie hum. Inland Australia was a country of spirits, make no mistake. Buckler surrendered himself to the second-rank listening. The blackies were plugged into spirit way up to their tangled eyebrows. The bush itself took on their shapes. When the songs ended Buckler heard them swishing a branch, calling and laughing. They never slept at night without brushing the sand around their fires for fear of the devil man. They worked it smooth as a bowling alley and Buckler thought they were dated but understood their urge. He'd do it himself against them because Adrian de Grey was smarter than piss – knew the outback was not quite the realm of the white man yet. You didn't have to ask him. It was still to be won. Otherwise he wouldn't be serving this time round making his push for possession wearing government-issue khakis.

In the night Buckler's thoughts went spiralling down until he groaned in his sleep, waking boys fifty yards away like a bull seal yawping on an icefloe. It was a wonderful concern, the army. You could be the definition of its meaning and for that very reason you were made a ragbag supervisor.

Next morning, talking of maps, de Grey showed Buckler a silk handkerchief with an excellent map of Australia printed on it with technical detail exact. ‘What do you think of it?'

‘Good.'

‘Make of Nippon,' grinned the soldier.

‘That good-looking kid in your lot,' said Buckler, ‘the one who'd like to think I didn't exist, he's Birdy Pringle's Hammond, isn't he?'

‘That's Hammond all right. Proved a bit of a runaway but we nabbed him good.'

Buckler's truck needed a tow and they chained it behind de Grey's. It was another day's drive to Eureka homestead where a blacksmith's shop and a mechanic on the payroll promised repairs. Faces grinned at Buckler's dependence while he jolted in the passenger seat and tried to doze with his arms folded tight. Only one face, that boy Hammond's, kept itself turned away.

They came out into a vast dusty bowl with ancient hills behind them, crossed sand ridges, skirted a salt lake crusted with red-stained rime, plugged on through saltbush and arrived at the station, which loomed in a mirage of galvanised iron pavilions long before they debouched like gypsies with the reek of diesel in their baggy trousers, and stamped their boots.