—We come to things too late! I told myself aloud, but the lips were no longer wieldy enough to make the sentence.
I wanted to see my wife, so I could dissuade her from marring herself with hatred of Jacko.
The air felt soft, the earth was dry to the last syllable of its core, and death and oblivion came clattering down to suck me away. I cried aloud for my wife and daughter. I was an antipodean martyr. I had died for mateship. The mateship of the most disreputable, casual, promiscuous and whimsical male. He had won me over by attacking the Wall with a jackhammer, and now I was dying, as men do, for the sake of casual friendship.
But so noisily and with such a clatter and maelstrom of dust.
The shadow of death perched ten yards away. It was blue in fact and had Burren Waters Cattle Company Pty. Ltd. written in dusty yellow on its flanks. It settled, its clatter died to a whine, and Boomer Webb, Stammer Jack’s Vietnam veteran helicopter pilot, descended from it, leaving a woman seated inside.
The Emptors had influenced his idiom and he uttered words that were not in tune with his accent.
—Jesus, you silly buggers never travel with water eh.
The blades of the beast turned languidly now. You could have stopped them with a finger. I picked up Madame Bovary, and Boomer extracted my two bags from the open boot.
Through my dry lips, I pushed forward a few stony words. I didn’t understand myself what they were.
He said, No, listen, we can come and get the bloody car tomorrow.
Tall, and holding both my bags in one hand, he hauled me up with the other. My head hung. I could see his dusty boots.
He said, Jesus, another day out here and you could have been in big trouble.
I raised my chin by an act of will. The woman in the co-pilot’s seat turned her face to me. The features were familiar. She wore an Akubra, and that confused me for a second. It was Sunny Sondquist, with some Burren Waters’ protein having filled her out and put some colour in her. Her fuller hair in particular made her hard to recognize. And though I knew her so well, she looked at me without recognizing me. I would have liked to have told her that I was the one who took her to the airport, but again my tongue was too unwieldy. Boomer loaded my bags into the back seat of the machine and then unstrapped one of those hessian bush water bags from a bar above the skids of the helicopter. I could taste the sweet bore water before he had even undone the lid. I had taken two such water bags to the Horn of Africa with me, and the Africans had strapped them to the front of their trucks and been enthused by the way the movement of the air itself cooled the water inside. I started to drink Boomer’s delightful water, and he took it away before I was half finished.
—You’ll start chundering if you have too much, he told me gently.
He motioned me into the back of the helicopter behind his own seat. He strapped me in while Sunny watched, and I strove to define all that was so different about her. Of course, it was that I was the victim now, and she was in the novel situation of looking at me in the way the saved look at victims. She was feeling the interest the saved feel, the well-watered.
I said, I took you to the airport the day Jacko took you and Delia there. In New York.
She said, I wasn’t too clear in the head then.
I told her my name and she nodded.
—How’s Jacko, she asked, almost dutifully, as you ask about someone you hardly know.
—He’s going to become famous. A game show. Hubert Greenspan. Jacko’s been found by the king of game shows.
—He deserves it, said Sunny Sondquist judiciously. What did you say your name was?
I told her again. Boomer climbed into the pilot’s seat and slammed the door.
—Hi, Pudgy, he said, winking at Sunny Sondquist.
He put on his headphones, and, contentedly, she put on hers. He let her punch a particular button and there was that extraordinary exhaust scream. We rose straight up and I saw the sun still high to the west, and then darkness milling to the east. Sunny Sondquist turned to me and indicated I should put the headphones on. When I did, Boomer said, Jesus, if anything had happened to you Chloe would’ve been really ropable!
We veered away towards the shadowy hemisphere of the earth. Canted across the sky, we soon crossed another track, broad and pink in the late day.
Boomer listed the helicopter over even further so that I could get a good view of it.
—That’s the road you should’ve taken, he informed me.
Sunny too was glancing casually past Boomer. An accustomed road, you’d think she knew it thoroughly and had for a long time.
Sunny Sondquist said something like, Give us the corkscrew.
In the earphones I heard Boomer chuckling. He asked me how I was. The water had made me queasy, but I told him I was fine.
—Okay, he said. You’ll enjoy this.
The machine now slewed violently westward, away from the Burren Waters road. I struggled to keep my stomach and my consciousness. We raged upwards towards some perilous zenith. The machine baulked then, as if it had reached exactly the square metre of sky Boomer had aimed it for. This seemed to be almost a zone of silence, for the engines couldn’t be heard. But then our tail tipped up, leisurely as a dolphin’s, and we went gyrating and corkscrewing down the sky. And Sunny had urged this on Boomer, this mad blending of earth and sky, this crazy gyre aimed – as our ascent had been at one square metre of sky – at one terrible square metre of earth. While my brain ached and bile entered my mouth and one of my bags fell on me, I could hear Sunny laughing. For the second time in an hour and a half, I decided this was my last dusk. Whereas before I had been a martyr for mateship, now I was offered up for the sake of Sunny’s liberated merriment.
In ten seconds I would find out what Larson had found out in his fallen helicopter. Boomer, of course, didn’t intend us to hit the ground, but he had done it frequently enough before. I knew that once he had fallen on Stammer Jack’s ankle.
This time, though, we levelled out and I swallowed the acid in my mouth and held my head. I could still hear Sunny Sondquist’s hilarity in the headphones.
—Gets her every time, yelled Boomer.
Now we were progressing in level flight at an altitude which I surmised to be five feet above the tops of the rubberbushes. I saw the sales ring where Stammer Jack sold his quarter horses come veering towards us. Boomer climbed a little as a courtesy, so that the homestead compound would not be coated in unnecessary dust. Then we descended onto bare gravel beyond the mustering yards.
Sunny continued to sit still in her seat even after Boomer had cut the engines. They both seemed to have their ears cocked to the communally savoured whine of the rotor. When she did dismount, she came politely round to my side of the helicopter and waited for me to descend as well. I thought of how she must have treated Kremmerling with that degree of politeness, maintaining a composed air while waiting for the next torment.
—You didn’t mind that, did you? she asked me.
—No, I lied. I think it cleared my head.
She covered her mouth with her hand and laughed.
Her skin had changed of course. She had a good skin for this climate. Chloe’s sun had turned Sunny Sondquist’s arms olive.
—I wonder could I have another mouthful of Boomer’s water?
She went and unlatched the bag from its bar and offered it to me. I drank again.
—Not too much, she counselled me, like a veteran of the bush.
She said, You’re staying in the stockmen’s quarters, just near where Lucy is.
She had the accommodation map in her head too.
Boomer and I toted my luggage past the aircraft and equipment hangars, across the red-dust square of Emptorville – at one end the homestead and at the other, the infinite west where Boomer had so recently tried to crash. Boomer opened a screen door and led me into the red-brick quarters I’d once shared with Larson. I went to the wash basin and drank some water from the tap with as little an appearance of greed as
I could manage. I heard Boomer behind me telling Sunny to take me over to see Chloe. He himself had to go and see Jack Emptor.
—Have a beer with you later, he promised me.
As she led me up to the house, Sunny asked, Have you ever been up here before?
She put the question like an owner, as if it was startling that I had made it all this distance, and not nearly so startling that she had.
I told her I’d been a few times, that I had at one stage known Chloe better than I’d known Jacko.
—She’s not so pleased with Jacko, said Sunny with a slow smile.
—No, but you should be. You’re a different woman here.
Sunny blinked and looked around her. She said, I’ve been waiting for something like this all my life. This is what California was meant to be like except it wasn’t. I’m just pleased I’m out of all that.
—Any visa problems? I asked, knowing that like America, Australia, once so open to migrants, was so restrictive now.
—Well, she said, I’ve got six months. And anything can happen. Chloe rang up some senator in Canberra and asked about asylum, but he said it didn’t apply in this case.
We mounted the stairs, passed Chloe’s library on the verandah, and Sunny knocked on the front door.
After no more than ten seconds, Chloe came, grinning.
It was the old Chloe from long before the encounter with Bickham or Frank’s pseudo-cancer. She looked richly brown, and she was plump and wrapped in batik which left her shoulders bare.
—Well, she told me in a rush, look what the cat dragged in. You don’t look too bad eh. Mustn’t be hanging round with that self-destructive bugger Jacko any more. Sit down here on the verandah and let’s have a cup of tea. They found you okay? I knew in my water that you’d take the bloody wrong fork eh.
—It used to be signposted, didn’t it?
—Yes. But the bloody blackfellers burnt the sign for firewood. Going in and out of Burren Waters on this excision bullshit. Sunny, love, could you do the honours with the tea?
—No problem, said Sunny. She too sounded slightly Emptorized. She went into the house.
Chloe and I settled ourselves on cane furniture.
—I suppose you’ve come to spy for my mongrel son?
—He said you wanted to see me.
—Yes. I suppose I might have. Always a pleasure. And you’re writing a bit better now. I liked the last one okay, the Chinese one.
—Thanks a million. I had to spend time in Sichuan and shit in hole-in-the-ground loos, so I’m glad it passed muster. You know you shouldn’t have done it, Chloe. White Rights Party! Didn’t you learn anything while you were in Woollahra.
—Not a bloody lot, she admitted without shame.
She squinted out at the red dust beyond the green fringes of her garden.
—I mean, was there a lot to learn eh? Bugger the lot of you anyhow! If you don’t think we deserve this place, you ought to read a bit of bloody history. Old Jack’s grandmother died on a wagon in the Channel Country with her eighth bloody brat. They settled a cattle lease over on the Gulf. Her husband bought her a piano, but the white ants got it within three months. You ought to read what Laurie Emptor and his wife suffered when they settled here. If they want their bloody excision, how is it they don’t recognize my rights eh?
She sighed and settled back.
—It’s like I said. Bickham’s a fucking genius, the prophet Elijah eh. But I reckon he’s a shit-arse human. He would have put up with a socialist child molester better than he put up with me. And a bloody shame anyhow. Poor old bastard’s on his last legs. Khalil’s got blood pressure. I would have cooked for them till the last, and to hell with the mongrel bastard. But it seems I’m not bloody worthy.
I found myself trying to console her about Bickham. He’d separated from friends suddenly and without giving second chances, and these tendencies had grown worse as he aged. He was a severe deity. He was, for example, a devout Republican in the Australian sense. He wanted to see the last constitutional ties with Great Britain severed, an end to the Monarch of Great Britain as head of state of Australia, and an end to Australians taking oaths to a monarch who was twelve thousand miles removed from their shores.
Evans had told me that a woman artist Bickham had been friendly with had accepted an Order of the British Empire in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List in the late 1970s. The moment Michael Bickham opened the Sydney Morning Herald and saw that, the artist was as good as dead to him.
Similarly, an actor was invited to a cocktail party in Sydney Harbour on the Royal yacht Britannia. Again, the guest list appeared in the Herald and was scanned by that Old Testament prophet, Bickham. He never recognized that actor at public events again, and avoided productions in which he appeared. He didn’t have a lot of time for the contrite though fallible heart, the old Bickham.
Not that Chloe was contrite. She and Stammer Jack were determined to fight the excision order before the Land Rights Court.
—If you call it a court. They’ll come out here and set up a tent, and the bloody judge will wear shorts and socks and listen to a load of bullshit from some white PhD with a beard, probably that streak of misery Helen’s involved with. And the poor bloody blackfellers will go along so as not to disappoint either of the bastards.
—That’s one way of looking at it, I said. The other way of looking at it is that the Wodjiri might have been waiting all along for the bloke with a beard and the judge in knee socks to come along and answer their concerns.
She said, You’ve been watching too many bloody current affairs programs!
Sunny arrived back with the tea, set it down like a woman who’d had a life of light, and poured it for everyone. How I craved it. I drank it black. It was known to be the best for thirst up here, and it was. Sunny took her own cup and wandered with it down the stairs and out through the garden, now and then sipping, and occasionally touching the fronds of this or that shrub. Kremmerling, without any beneficence but by detaining her in darkness, had induced in her such powers of concentration.
I said to Chloe that it was kind, what she was doing for Sunny.
She said, Poor bloody little stray. Sometimes I think she’s just going to snap in two. Goes muttering around the place. But Delia can read the signs. Delia’s pretty happy with her.
—Does she still have that old sleeping bag?
—She did have some ratty old thing when she first arrived. Haven’t seen it though. I wouldn’t mind betting Delia burned it. But I tell you what about Sunny. She earns her keep. Bloody works like a tiger. No job too menial. I thought Yanks were different. That Delia too. Delia’s a good one. Maybe after she fixes Sunny up she can start on the bloody rest of us.
—I suppose you know Sunny had a pretty savage training.
—That’s right. A few things come out about that. Pretty damn strange eh. Makes me respect the mongrel bastard a bit more eh.
—Delia and Sunny. What about their immigration situation?
—Come off it! Delia and Petie are at it like bloody rabbits. Petie’s not going to let someone like her go. Mind you, she’s three times as bright as that great lean streak of misery you saw when you first came. And as for Boomer, I told him that if he took advantage of Sunny’s confusion, he can forget about flying helicopters around here. And he was quite hurt about that, went all noble eh. I think he’s very taken you know. What a pair. Lost soul to lost bloody soul.
—Well, Chloe, you’re not made to be a candidate for the Senate. You’re a social engineer.
—Too bloody right. I socialized the little black tart out of here soon enough, and I wasn’t going to let a good girl like Delia go. You know what the gene pool is up here? Jesus, Delia’s like the arrival of a bloody genetic freight train. Raise the average bloody IQ of the miserable bloody Emptors, tell you that!
We drank more tea, and Sunny wandered to the limits of the garden. She seemed to be discussing matters in a low voice with the palms and ferns.
—Doe
s Jacko keep in touch with Lucy?
—Oh God, you tell me. Bastard’s called a few times on the radio-telephone. But the radio telephone’s so bloody complicated it’s an excuse for not saying anything eh. I tell her to put the word on him. Tell him what’s happened. But she’s not that sort of girl. She’s no bloody social engineer. So I respect her wishes. I suppose you’ll have to too.
—What wishes do you mean?
—You’ll find out at tea-time.
By which she meant dinner-time.
So we sat and talked about Frank Emptor. We both found ourselves laughing over him. He had been a thief of some style.
—You know, he’s really got genuine criminal tendencies, said Chloe like a boast. Everyone forgives him. Even Bickham. All the people he ripped off in Sydney, the Mulcahys and so on, he’s their main dinner table story. His lawyer told me that the poor little bugger got an extra six months for that, for being bloody likeable, you know. Nothing frightens a judge like a rogue with imagination eh.
Sunny came back up the stairs from the garden to pour even more tea. It was exquisite to me since I was still dry to the core.
—Have another yourself, Sunny, Chloe offered.
—No, that’s okay, said Sunny. And she hung her arm around one of the verandah posts and looked out through the garden at the land which trumped California and so clearly soothed her heart, though it did not take away her manic edge. Then she wandered off again, hatless under the sun.
I saw Stammer Jack come through the gate. He wore his Akubra with its history of sweat. Overalls covered his body and ended in his ankle boots. He came up the pathway as if he was intending to skirt past us and go straight into the house, heading for some secret business, perhaps a sip of Bundaberg rum.
—Come and say hello to our guest, you miserable bastard, Chloe told him with genuine, venomous affection. She was a woman whose marriage was mended.