Busting God
short story
Danielle de Valera
Copyright Danielle de Valera 2014
Busting God
short story
Cover and story glyphs by C S McClellan
All rights reserved. No part may be reproduced in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
If you would like to do any of the above, please seek permission first by contacting the author at
[email protected] ISBN 978-0-9923311-2-2
Published in the United States by Old Tiger Books.
First published in Australia in Blue Crow, Vol. 1, Issue 2, October 2010.
My thanks to Bernard Delaney, formerly Southern Regional Commander of the Australian Bureau of Narcotics, for his advice on police procedures and for his memoir NARC!: Inside the Australian Bureau pf Narcotics, which formed the bulk of the research for this story.
Table of Contents
Story start
Halfway
Last scene
About the author
More O’Neill and Lawson (aka God) stories coming
Other works by this author
One last thing
Busting God
I loved the work too well. That was the problem. Even sitting in my kitchen nursing two cracked ribs, the contents of the house trashed around me, I still loved it.
But I was growing older.
I watched what I ate. I sweated at karate and ran miles every day so that I could stay in the field.
Still I grew older.
Reg Mulcahey was leaning against my kitchen sink, looking worried. He pulled a packet of Camels from his pocket, lit two and passed one to me.
“Why didn’t you tell those cops you were a narc? Christ, Michael!”
I opened the freezer and pulled out a packet of frozen peas I’d intended to use in the Pritikin tuna and vegetable casserole that night. I sat down and held the packet against my rapidly closing eyelid.
“What’d you expect me to do, Reg—blow a cover I’ve been working on for months?”
“Well, y’ cover’s blown now,” Reg drawled. “I had to show them my ID to get them off you. They can send someone else into that nightclub. By the way, The Eagle wants to see you. That’s why I came.”
The CEO had eyes that seemed to see right through you; that’s why we called her The Eagle. This afternoon she was in a hurry. She was due at a high-powered press conference on narcotics at two. She could barely make the time to tell me I was taking a paid trip to the Northern Rivers to bust a heroin dealer everyone up there called God. She threw my new ID papers at me and told me to catch the next train out of Sydney.
“Where exactly would you like me to go, ma’am?”
“If you’re meaning a town, O’Neill—try Murwillumbah.”
My clothes were torn and bloodied. I was still holding the packet of frozen peas to my eye. She didn’t seem to notice.
“I’d like to take Azure with me,” I ventured.
“Nix to that, you’re taking Johnson with you. Not on the same train, of course.”
I knew Baby Johnson from Vietnam. Everything he touched turned to trouble. I didn’t want to go anywhere with Baby, but it was no use arguing.
The peas had melted. I pitched them into her wastepaper basket and turned to go.
“O’Neill?” She got me just as I reached the doorway, a trick of hers. “When you come back—you do intend to come back, don’t you?—I expect you to take that desk job. Why don’t you marry that girl and settle down?” she hurled after me. “You’re too old for field work anyway.”
We had a bad scene at Central Station when Azure discovered we were going north for some time; I’d told her we were going south to visit my mother in Wollongong.
“What about my elephant collection?” she cried.
I bundled her onto the train. “I’ll get you another.”
Maybe I should’ve felt guilty but wot-the-hell (as Mahitabel the cat said to Archie the cockroach). There were bound to be plenty of elephants in northern New South Wales.
Elephants you can always get.
Murwillumbah didn’t seem to be the place to find God. The trail led south to Ballina. We rented a small fibro cottage on the dunes in a hamlet called New Brighton, a safe sixty ks from Ballina. Then I linked up with Baby, who’d scored a disused banana-packing shed in the mountains outside Mullumbimby, and together we worked at slotting into the low life in what the sign on the highway declared was THE BIGGEST LITTLE TOWN IN AUSTRALIA.
I went home every night to New Brighton, when I could, and sat with Azure on the veranda overlooking the empty, windswept beach. At dusk the Cape Byron lighthouse would begin to flash every thirteen seconds. If the tide was high, the prawn fleet would be heading out to sea, emerging from the Brunswick River three ks to the south of us. One by one, the trawlers would go out over the treacherous bar, a space of about four hundred metres between them. At night Azure and I could see their deck lights, strung out like Chinese lanterns along the horizon.
They say the rock walls at the river’s entrance were built back in the ‘50s to give the fishing fleet safe access to the sea. Whatever. They were certainly there when my father brought us here for a holiday twenty-five years ago. We couldn’t afford to rent a house, so we pitched a big tent behind the dunes, Henry Lawson-style, and cooked over an open fire. In those days there were very few rangers, and they didn’t have the gung-ho approach they have today.
The heat, the stillness, the quality of the light in summer gave a strange, timeless feeling to the back to the dunes, like stepping into another dimension. The whole time we were there I wandered the beach like someone in a dream. It used to piss my father off. He wanted me to join the rest of the family in digging for pippis, but I had no time for that: I was hatching a plan. I wasn’t going to be stuck in some dead-end job for the rest of my life, like he was. I wasn’t going to be poor forever.
Well, like they say, The best-laid plans of mice and men ...
There was one downside to New Brighton. Spiders. Every night they spun their webs across the narrow path to the beach. Every morning there they’d be, swinging head-high in the centres of their three-metre webs. I smashed and banged at them each a.m. while Azure cowered behind me in tears. She had a phobia about spiders.
If I forgot to do this before I left, Azure would stand in the backyard and wail for Star.
“Star, Staar! Please help me!” And Star, whose real name was Stella, would come over from her house and gently remove all the spiders with a broom.
Star was a bona fide hippie—compost heap, vegetable garden, bicycle, pension, the lot. Separated from her husband because of his violence, she lived with her two pre-school children in the next house on the dunes. She was a little naive. The first day she met me, she showed me the dope plant she was growing to buy a pot-bellied stove for the kids for winter.
“It gets cold here when the winds blow, Michael,” she said. Her long dark hair hung down over her Indian print dress. She held a tanned, tow-haired toddler on one hip. “There are cracks in the floorboards and Ptolemy’s asthmatic.”
That wood stove was her Holy Grail; God was mine. And we both thought like Jesuits. Countless times in the night I saved The Plant from being ripped off by threatening total strangers with violence. Towards the end I started to complain.
“Azure, tell Star to harvest that bloody plant; there’s a wood stove’s worth there now.”
Azure would’ve been very lonely that autumn without Star and the two little boys. I was away a lot.
God was proving difficult to find.
I was looking for someone called David, who was said by one informant to have connections. It wasn’t that he sold foils out of his socks in the upwardly-mobile Top Pub but simply that he’d been here since the Nimbin Festival. He knew everybody.
I hoped that if we hung with David long enough he’d lead us to God, or at least to one of God’s connections. In the end, I came to the point directly.
“Do you know how to find God?” I asked him one night when Baby and I were hanging out in his shack eight ks from the Mullumbimby post office.
He’d been sitting on the bed, smoking and listening to Billie Holiday on his CD player. Now he leapt to his feet, scattering ashtrays and empty stubbies, and got me in a headlock from behind. He was strong and fast for a bloke on the disability pension.
“What are you?” he shouted.
I thought, Christ, are we sprung?
Baby didn’t even look up from the Conan novel he was reading on an upturned packing case.
Dave was still shouting. “Are you some kind of fucking, born-again Christian? If you are, get the fuck out of here!”
Dave hated Christians. He cherished a theory that a local Christian cult called the The True Vine had destroyed his marriage by converting his wife Doreen, who had been a first-class junkie and who was now one of the top cats in the True Vine industry. Doreen claimed she still loved Dave. She kept sending people around to convert him.
I squawked that I wasn’t a Christian, and he released me.
“You don’t use, do you?”
“I just want to deal a bit, make some money. Azure and I want to get married.”
This answer seemed to satisfy him. “Can you get into town Wednesdays? Say round one at the Bottom Pub.”
He threw two single mattresses onto the kitchen floor and blew out the kerosene lamp. Baby and I lay down in the clothes we stood up in. Possums clattered over the old tin roof. The bull koalas called weirdly, like cattle. And for once I didn’t have any bad dreams.
When I woke up in the morning, Baby was gone. One of the local freaks, called Captain was standing in the doorway, leaning against the door frame, smoking a rollie. He was wearing a white dress with lace trimming.
I shouldn’t have been that hungover, though we did get into the rum at the end, so I looked away. But when I looked back he was still standing there.
“I suppose you’re wondering why I’m wearing this dress,” he said.
“Not especially,” I answered and went out to have a piss. Then I came back inside and made myself a cup of coffee.
“I lost my clothes,” Captain explained.
“Uh huh.”
“Well, I didn’t lose them really; I just mislaid them.”
“Uh huh.” I stirred the sugar into my coffee and studied him.
He was around thirty, about ninety kilos, a hundred and eighty-three centimetres—and fit. Very fit for a freak.
‘When I wanted to leave I couldn’t find m’clothes anywhere,” he continued, “so I went through the chick’s wardrobe. Well, I couldn’t go home starkers, now could I?”
“You’ve got great taste, Captain,” I said. “It looks good on you.”
He flashed me a grin from under his mop of naturally blond hair that had been streaked pink and green and purple with food colouring.
“Good,” he said. “As soon as the shops open I’m going to walk into town and have breakfast at The Country Kitchen.”
“You do that, Captain,” I said.
I decided to raid his dilly bag as soon as I got the chance and have his ID checked out by the bureau.
The Bottom Pub specialised in rednecks and footballers. Even at one o’clock on a Wednesday, the bar was crowded. I took my drink into the beer garden, ordered the compulsory counter lunch and waited for the connection to show.
He joined me almost immediately, wearing the standard male, middle-class apparel of the town: long socks, long shorts and a shirt with barber’s pole stripes. The gut hung over the belt. For an instant I wondered if he was an off-duty cop, but he didn’t have any of the mannerisms.
He introduced himself as Wayne. “David tells me you’re interested in God.”
In all my years in this business, I’ve never met a go-between I liked. I never liked their style; they had no class.
“Let’s just say,” I muttered, “I hope my prayers will be answered. Does God really deliver?”
Two lunches landed heavily on the table in front of us: T-bones with French fries, some ornamental lettuce and tomato, and a sprig of triple-curl parsley.
The waitress took one look at me and went to fetch the publican.
“You wanted four weights, is that right?” Wayne asked. “You got the bread?”
Bread was Wayne’s best shot at street cred. Like I said, no style. I ratted around in my calico dilly bag and produced ten thousand dollars. Wayne didn’t seem to mind the grubby state of the bills and smiled as he counted them.
“Yes, I think we should be able to do business.”
I picked up a chip. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the publican bearing down on our table at Mach 3.
“O’Brien?” The publican’s voice boomed out across the beer garden. “Is that you, O’Brien?” He was short-sighted.
Wayne waved a well-cared-for hand. “It’s okay, Tom, he’s with me—honey,” he said to the waitress as she mopped our table with a grubby cloth, “get us two more beers, will you?” He pushed a ten-dollar bill into her ample cleavage. “Thanks a lot, love, keep the change.”
The publican disappeared. The greenery swallowed him up. The waitress returned like magic and smashed the beers down in front of us.
Wayne watched her retreating form. “Where were we? Oh yes, I guess you’ll be wanting to see the goods.”
He took out what looked like a packet of Drum and placed it on the table between us. Inside was a plastic sandwich bag containing approximately four ounces of what appeared to be heroin.
I stared at the packet sitting there between the red plastic salt and pepper shakers. There were other people eating lunch in the beer garden: a couple of families with small children, and four girls I recognised from the Commonwealth Bank.
“You want to test it?” Using the end of his fork, Wayne shovelled enough for one hit onto the torn-off corner of his red paper serviette. “Here, make yourself comfortable.”
I took the stuff, locked myself in the toilet and tested it. It was the real thing. I waited long enough to have shot it and returned to the table.
Wayne smiled at me. “Good gear eh?”
I tried to appear mellow. “Look,” I said; it was now or never. “I’m in a position to make a much bigger deal than this. Much bigger.” I let him hang for a while before I said, “Can I trust you? I work for someone. And the person I work for, well, he’s got unlimited finance.”
“Unlimited finance?” The magic words. “How much are we talking?”
I paused. “Two hundred thousand—maybe more. Can you supply that much?”
Wayne nodded. “Can you get all that bread together in one place?”
“No worries,” I lied. “The man I work for is big in Sydney. But ...” I pretended to drift a bit, “an amount of money like that ... you understand. I’d have to hand it to The Man myself.”
Wayne shook his head. “God never gives interviews.”
I took a stab. “Not even for a quarter of a million?”
Wayne considered for a while, then he picked up the Drum packet and went away to make a phone call from the public telephone near the bar.
I expected a blank No to my proposal; it sounded too much like a set-up to me, but Wayne returned as I was finishing my steak and said, “He’s going to consider it. Give me your ID.”
I gave him my fake pension card. He took down the relevant details. No doubt favours would be exchanged, and I’d be punched through somebody’s computer. He was about to return the
card when my address registered in his lizard brain. So I lived next door to his no-good-wife Stella? Was she keeping her nose clean?
What the!? He’d been married to Star? I couldn’t believe it. I wasn’t going to tell this slime ball how well she and Baby were getting along. He’d probably have Baby beaten to within an inch of his life—or worse. I feigned nodding off.
Wayne pushed the ID and the Drum packet across the table to me. “You’d better get going now, you’re ruining the tone of Tom’s establishment. We’ll be in touch by the end of the week.”
“How will you know where to find me?”
Wayne smiled. “God’ll find you. God is everywhere. He’s omniscient.”
“I think you mean omnipresent.” I slung the price of the second beer down onto the table, picked up the gear and walked out.
“By the way, your friend’s in gaol!” Wayne called after me. “Drunk and disorderly.”
It was the last day of autumn. We lay on the lawn on the headland opposite the Beach Hotel in Byron Bay. Azure and I were half-under a hibiscus bush with double pink flowers. Captain, who’d been sticking to us like glue, lay beside us with his latest girlfriend Julie. She was a wisp of a thing with scrappy black hair and a see-through Indian arrangement.
She was also a dedicated junkie. I wondered if Captain knew that.
I was waiting for word from God. It was Saturday now, and I was still waiting. I was drifting away on the sound of the sea when Captain jabbed me in the ribs.
A person in long, flowing white robes and with equally flowing grey hair was approaching across the grass. S/he stopped in front of Captain and Julie.
“I am the current manifestation of the Archangel Gabriel!”
“Yeah yeah.”
“The only redemption is Jesus.”
“Piss off!”
“Hear me, man, for I am the one sent to show thee the way to God.”