Dirt Music
Fox smiles and turns bodily to orient himself by the chart. He hears the jangle of the guitar as Axle comes smiling into the clearing. The smile drops. The instrument clangs to the ground as the boy comes running. He snatches the map and throws it onto the embers of the cookfire. Fox cries out in surprise. The paper ignites with a gentle whump and Axle is back in his face demanding the other maps, anything he has. Fox appeals to Menzies who advises him to give them up. The kid is trembling with fury. His eyes are startling, their yellowy whites right under his own. There’s nothing Fox can do but pull the maps out and watch them burn.
Fuckin bastards, mutters the boy standing over the flames.
Shit, says Fox. That’s torn it.
Got a thing about em, says Menzies. Just trouble, maps. You can’t really blame him. Like they suck everythin up. Can’t blame a blackfulla not likin a map, Lu.
Go on the country, says the boy almost pacified now. Not on the map.
And what the fuck does that mean?
Menzies shrugs. Then he smiles. Means, be careful you don’t get lost.
• • •
All day, he works his way down waterlogged ridges to the sea, stunned by the loss of his maps. Maybe it’s for the best, he thinks in the end. Another burnt bridge. Forces you forward.
Not an hour into his trek he hears a crack and discovers that he’s snapped the end off his fishing rod. The thing is buggered now. It does little for his mood.
From a long saddle of stone he sees the gulf light up in a sudden grilling moment of sunlight, and in the distance, rising from the milky turquoise water, the islands. There’s nothing behind him, nothing left now; it’s all ahead.
Just on sunset he stumbles down to a tiny beach of black stones. He searches the rocks and thickets for a boat. Insects swarm at his ankles and he begins to wonder if perhaps he’s been sucked in by some joke between Axle and Menzies. But in the last light, beneath a mat of vines, he finds a battered sea kayak covered in logos and stickers from some geographic expedition. It’s a stubby polythene thing but sturdy enough. The paddle is tethered to the hull and in the compartments he finds fishing tackle, a grapple and a coil of old nylon rope.
He lies awake all night beside a fitful fire, persecuted by sandflies and the spectres of crocodiles. Before dawn he rises to eat and prepare for the long paddle. In the first light he tests the kayak for leaks. It sweats a little but seems fine. He watches as the tide rises, bringing with it the flotsam of mangrove leaves, sticks and mud bubbles like foamed chocolate. When he senses the tide peaking he drags the packed kayak to the water and sets out. The sky is clear. The sun glazes everything.
With the weight of all his gear in it the kayak feels precarious. It takes him a while to get used to it and to find a paddling rhythm. He knows the gentlest nudge of a passing croc will put him over. The water is like shot silk and he barely raises a crease. It’s so hot out there, so still and clear that the distances seem to expand until everything looks twice as far as it did on the map. He paddles with the great plateau in the air behind him. Works his way out along endless walls of mangroves. Across a rivermouth a mile wide. Toward the intermittent white flare of beaches on the farther shore.
At the corner of his vision, a flash. He swivels to see a mackerel fall from the sky and hit the water with a resounding smack.
Just as the tide turns he reaches the other side but the coast here is rocky. So he works his way along in search of a place to land. He begins to sense the tide sweeping him parallel. The kayak is sluggish. His anxiety rises. Where are the beaches?
By the time he comes to a white shell cove between sheltering headlands he’s all but had it. He angles in through the current with the last of his strength, staggers out into the blood-hot shallows and drags the kayak up the beach.
First up he spreads his swag on the white shellgrit to dry in the sun. Then he goes in search of somewhere to camp. Within moments he stumbles on six red fuel drums hidden in a clump of spinifex. Forty-fours, all of them full. Immediately his excitement evaporates.
At the end of the cove he comes to a sandstone overhang whose shade is enhanced by a bough shelter of loosely thatched spinifex and within its shade he discovers a cache of weatherproof crates, two generators, a freezer wrapped in plastic, stackable chairs, PVC piping and a ten-horsepower outboard. Further back the cave has a maze of chambers like outspread fingers. In the darkness he hears water dripping onto water.
He fetches a candle from his kit and finds rock niches full of sportfishing tackle and canned food.
Even here, he thinks.
In the mouth of the cave he makes camp for the night.
• • •
He wakes with hermit crabs all over him and utters a silly yell. The sudden movement turns them into pebbles as they lie doggo. He laughs. His own voice sounds close beneath the stone roof. Down at the water’s edge he splashes himself cautiously. He makes tea, eats his last muesli bar and goes foraging in the cache to satisfy his curiosity.
Sealed in PVC sewer pipe he finds graphite casting rods. Their reels are in a battered Igloo cooler, some still in their boxes and never used and others wrapped in old mosquito nets and bits of calico. There are tin trunks full of lures—jigs, spoons, plugs, divers. He sees spools of nylon monofilament leader material and high-tech gelspun fishing line. Some kind of professional set-up for the Dry season. All the more reason to go further, deeper up the gulf.
Fox packs his kit piece by piece into the kayak and straps the bulky swag across the top. From the cold pool in the darkness at the back of the cave he fills his canteen and waterbag, and, passing the stockpile of angling equipment on his way out, he hesitates. Unless he can fix it, and he hasn’t yet thought how, his own rod is all but useless. He knows he can fish with handlines, that blackfellas favour them, but the casting power of a rod will make all the difference out here.
What else will you live on but fish? A good rod could save your life. He picks out a Penn rod and an Abu baitcasting reel. He fills a calico bag with lures and line and hooks, and jams it all into the kayak. Before he pushes off he goes back for the mosquito net the reel was wrapped in.
He paddles down the eastern edge of the gulf past mangrove forests and rocky promontories and islets. The land this side is much drier than Menzies and Axle’s camp. Sandstone breakaways rise from the spinifex and bleached acacia. Inland it looks desolate. The creeks are small with rockbars or sandspits at their mouths. He labours right through the morning. The water is calm. Sweat rolls off him. He sees the islands rise slowly from the sea, distinguishing themselves from the enfolding land by their splashes of green. He makes the high red blunt one his bearing and in the early afternoon, as the sky builds with monsoon cloud, he comes into its shadow and looks up at its mesa bluffs and strangling vines and clamouring trees. There are boabs on the beach. Birds flit through their web of shadows. This is it, he thinks. This has to be the place.
six
THE DAY AFTER she found the envelope in Jim’s desk Georgie went walking to clear her head and make some decisions. The morning was hot and clear. Out on the packed sand of the point she came upon Yogi Behr parked in the company truck. Surfers were just visible in the distance; they sat like kelp bunches out on the reef where the crests of incoming swells peeled back as vapour trails in the northeasterly. Yogi had binoculars clamped one-handed to his face as Georgie sidled up to the window to say hello. One horny foot was up on the dash and the cab stank of ouzo. It took him a while to register her presence.
Ah, he murmured. Wonder woman.
G’day, Yogi.
Always wondered what bras were for. To keep ladies’ arms on with. Me mum never told me.
I bet she didn’t tell you a lot of things, Yogi.
Told me to steer clear of bad luck.
And did you?
See a lot of bad luck when you drive an ambulance.
And some good luck, remember.
But any fuckwit can pick a Jonah, Georgie.
She
looked at him. He had the binoculars back to his eyes.
Are you referring to me, Yogi?
Yogi pursed his lips. Those Foxes, he said. Shit luck from go to whoa. The mother, you know, she was killed by an act of God. And the old man, Wally—Christ. He’d go out on a boat and they’d put him ashore before the end of the first day. Crayboats, prawners, sharkboats—he just killed their luck. Like a bad joke. You know one year he built a tree house up a pole in the front paddock. Lived up there for weeks. Bloody fishermen, they’d turn their head drivin past, look the other way so they didn’t get touched. You don’t whistle on a boat, Georgie, and you still don’t take bananas out, but, round here, most of all, you don’t take a bloody Fox on board.
What was he doing up a pole? Georgie asked despite herself.
Christ knows. Waitin for the end of the world, I spose. Fuck, he was the end of the world, the silly old prick. He was rubbish. They were all rubbish.
They’re all dead, Yogi, she said with feeling.
Bar one.
Yes, bar one.
And what d’ye figure the odds are on that, all of em dyin in a rollover on their own driveway? I was there, love. You can’t bloody imagine. And that last boy sittin in the ambulance like a zombie. You could feel it comin off his skin like electricity, just pure and simple shit luck. That’s what you were foolin with. People did you a favour, love.
Well, thanks for the enlightenment, she said, pushing off the doorsill.
Community service, he muttered. That’s me.
Ever think about luck? she asked Jim that evening.
He looked up from the weather fax. He seemed startled by the question.
No.
Jim, every fisherman lives by it. All of you.
He shook his head. Knowledge, he said. Seamanship. Experience. Good data and record keeping. A bit of lateral thinking and instinct maybe. Bad fishermen need luck.
You’re no different, though. You ban bananas.
That’s just to keep the deckies happy. They’re superstitious.
And you’re not?
No.
Hm.
What’s this from, some movie?
There was a tone of dismissal in his voice that Georgie resented.
No. I was just thinking.
People are at the mercy of their own actions, he said. Consequences. But it’s nothing to do with luck. Hey, I can’t believe you sold that boat. Could have sailed around the world in that.
So you never had bad luck?
He gazed at her. No.
You didn’t feel unlucky when your wife got cancer?
Jim’s stare was cool and searching. He broke it off to look at the fax in his lap. Georgie saw the anger in him. Debbie was out of bounds. Talk of her—even from the boys—caused him to shut down with a kind of instant fatigue.
He went to bed without speaking.
Georgie pulled in at the fruit stand. It was a forlorn structure. Much of it was held together with fencewire. Only a single sheet of iron remained on its one-sided roof. The tilted wooden uprights were weathered grey.
She drove on up the white ruts through the front paddock past the olive trees ghosted with limestone dust until she reached the yard between the sheds and the house. She parked in the shade of the casuarinas. A few feathers lay snagged in brown weeds but there was no other sign of poultry. Climbing out into the heat she got a whiff of tainted air, the sort you got passing a dead beast at the roadside.
With a stone she broke a pane beside the back door and let herself into the kitchen. There was a glutinous ooze at the foot of the fridge. She flicked a light switch. The power was out. She didn’t like the smell. It gave her a spurt of fear, a charge of memory. Mrs Jubail.
Georgie didn’t know why she was here. The boys were at school and Jim at sea. She just had to get out of town.
She figured the power bills hadn’t been paid and the company had cut off supply. But then she remembered the generator droning out in the shed. They weren’t even connected. Chances were the diesel had run out or he’d switched it off.
Georgie supposed that some last part of her had hoped he might have slipped back in under the radar. There was that much to admit to yourself.
As she got closer to the shed the smell got worse. By the time she entered the open maw of the workshop she was pinching her nose. Flies billowed in her path; they were a black crepe upon the freezers. An irrational dread took hold of her as she advanced upon them. She threw back the lid of the first and found bags of octopus an angry shade of foaming purple. They looked like shrunken heads piled there, warty with tentacle suckers. The second chest was big enough for what she dreaded most. She summoned a bit of nursely steel and hoiked the cover up. When she saw the writhing nest of feet and feathers she blurted a laugh.
It helped to think of the diesel generator as an overfed replica of the sort of motor she knew about. She had once laboured over a Yanmar marine diesel in the lonely tidal nightmare of Camden Sound. Here at least you had a stable platform and room to manoeuvre. You didn’t have to hope the fool up on deck could keep you off the rocks while you worked.
The manual hung off the wall from a piece of string. The fuel tank was empty. She knew enough to realize that she’d need to bleed the lines. The smell from the other side of the asbestos wall was horrific; you could feel it on your tongue as you worked. There was a five-gallon drum of diesel beside the empty reservoir. She tipped it in and primed the thing as best she could. It took an hour to get it going but it gave her an absurd sense of pride, far more than she’d taken in keeping Avis McDougall alive.
She left it roaring and went in and cleaned the kitchen. As she worked she considered what Yogi had said about luck. She remembered her crossing of the Timor Sea. They did it without a hiccup, the original piece of plain sailing, and she knew it was undeserved. They had no right to be let off so lightly; they shouldn’t have even been out there. She felt she was using up her quota. And hadn’t it all come undone at the very last moment? Colliding with another vessel as they entered the anchorage at Senggigi. Screaming disaster.
Georgie had always assumed that an obsession with luck was the preserve of passive people, others unlike herself. Hadn’t she been a great resister, holding out against all those limiting expectations? Trouble was she’d begun to see how little her resistance had brought her. Lately it seemed to her that she’d expended so much of her life’s energy digging in her heels that she rendered herself powerless. There was a fraudulence about her rebellious spirit. She was drifting, had been for years. Even in the job. There’s nothing like an institutional organization for dressing you up in an aura of action and hiding your aimless passivity. She hadn’t made things happen for years. Things happened to her. Wasn’t that simply, blindly, trusting herself to luck—without having the honesty to admit it? At least White Pointers owned up to their dependence on fortune.
Georgie made herself a coffee. She found a clothespeg and a shovel and buried the purulent freezer loads out in the paddock. Afterwards she tipped bleach into the chests and left their lids up.
Later she showered and lay on the dusty sofa in the library room while her clothes dried in the hot wind, and as she sprawled there she realized that her situation had altered again so quickly and in so many ways that she couldn’t keep up. Whatever the hell Jim was up to she had a car now; she owned it. And there was enough money in her account to give her real choices.
This place, for instance. It was empty. It was somewhere, wasn’t it? She couldn’t countenance the idea of returning to the suburban blandness of Perth. And she had no desire to travel. This might be a short-term option. But how would she spend her time? Even if the White Pointers let her alone, how long could she seriously expect to last in a farmhouse hours from any suitable employment?
Still, she thought, whatever happens, however long it did last, it might be some sort of sanctuary. For a while. If she ever did make up her mind.
At her elbow a book of poems bristled with leave
s, paper clips, twigs which marked the pages. She picked it up absently and opened to a heavily marked passage.
There were those songs, a score times sung,
With all their tripping tunes,
There were the laughters once that rung,
There those unmatched full moons,
Those idle noons!
Annoyed she clapped it shut and set it down.
She woke up with a start at two o’clock that afternoon. Naked and dry-mouthed and, for a few moments, quite befuddled. She stumbled onto the verandah to find that her clothes had been blown to the dirt below.
At the highway a few minutes later she got out of the car and dragged the farm gate to.
A FEW DAYS LATER, Georgie went back to the Fox place with two five-gallon drums of diesel. She tried to figure out the bank of batteries and how much fuel she’d need to keep the generator going. She cleaned the entire house, folded clothes and put fresh sheets on Luther Fox’s bed. She stocked the fridge with a few things and added groceries to the cupboards.
On the third trip she brought the espresso machine from its box in Jim’s garage. She made herself little lunches of ricotta cheese on Ryvita biscuits and sat in the library scanning the shelves. She flipped through the fruitboxes full of LPs. There were Australian records from the seventies—Matt Taylor, Spectrum, The Indelible Murtceps, Tully—and weirdo albums by the Mahavishnu Orchestra, King Crimson, Sopwith Camel, The Flock, Backdoor, Captain Beefheart. There was an entire box of blues records and another of bluegrass and folk. In a tin trunk she found a deep jumble of sound cassettes, most of them pirate dubs with names scrawled across them in biro.
She just picked out a name—Chris Whitley—and stuck it in the machine. She lay on the sofa and listened to the languid voice with its momentary looping falsettos. The guitar was wiry, almost harsh-sounding. Georgie didn’t know much about music. She’d stopped being avid about it after adolescence and just bought stuff she heard on the radio. Yet there was once a time when she lay barricaded in her room lying on the bed with albums whose every song spoke directly. You could feel the singer pointing the words, the emotion, right at you. She lay here now staring at the water stains on the ceiling while these melancholy, enigmatic songs poured through the house. She’d never heard of this guy. She wondered what it meant to get over to the big sky country and be kissing time goodbye. All the words puzzled her and that strange wailing bottleneck guitar took some getting used to. But it stirred her. She lay back on the musty sofa and listened to the entire album.