Dirt Music

  Jim stopped walking. He stood with his hands in the pockets of his loose cotton shorts. In the moonlight his chest looked flaccid. He was aging—his breasts had begun to slip on him. In the lee of the point Georgie could see the masthead lights of anchored yachts.

  There was one night at the pub, the day Dirty Herman killed the pig. Everyone was off their faces. I was hammered on rum and speed, like a Catherine Wheel, I was. Staggered out with a woman and we ended up in Beaver’s wreckyard. I knew who she was—I’d had my eye on her for a long time. She was blasted, too. Anyway we were screwing on top of some old car when Beaver came to the back door. We were making a lot of bloody noise. He had a torch. He just opened the door and flashed the light around and saw us out there. This girl’s hair all over the hood of the car, our clothes everywhere. And I didn’t even stop. That light was in our eyes and I just kept at it, just grinning into the glare until he gave up and went inside and I kept going until I was finished. I was untouchable, Georgie. That’s how I was. That was the night Debbie had Josh. Nineteen-hour labour. The girl on the car, she was from the band. It was Sally Fox. And at the time I didn’t give a shit, never gave it a thought. I’d been daring myself to score her for years.

  Georgie looked at her feet on the sand. He couldn’t seem to stop now but she wished that he would.

  And then the day comes, Jim said, and it’s like a saw taking the top of your head off. You look at the x-ray they’ve done of your wife’s breast and it’s like you can read your whole life in it. Geez, there were plenty of other things but all I could think of was me and that girl. That particular girl. That one night. Like I could see it in the tumour. And the next tumour. All the operations, everything. Jesus, I wasn’t even thinking of my wife, you know, I was thinking to myself, you’ve done this, you’ve brought it on yourself. Sometimes I thought it was the way the others would see it, that the Fox luck had rubbed off, that I’d caught it from her like some disease. The sort of thing a good fire will always fumigate. But I spose deep down I knew it wasn’t true. It felt like judgement. Not just for that but every other mongrel thing I ever did to my wife, anyone. Some kind of judgement that wouldn’t let up until I changed.

  You can’t possibly believe that, said Georgie with a shudder.

  But I do, he said.

  It’s vile.

  I’m not proud of it, he said.

  I don’t mean that, I mean the way you’re seeing the world. Like some vengeful balance sheet.

  I reckon that’s how it is.

  Then haven’t you paid? Hell, you lost your wife.

  No, I think you have to make amends yourself. Give something, not just have something taken off you. It’s the only way to call the dogs off, I reckon—prove to yourself you’re changed.

  Like, what…doing some sort of penance?

  Maybe. Yes.

  And that’s what this is about? Delivering me to Lu Fox like some kind of pay-off? Who does it make amends to? His family honour? Two dead women?

  Georgie turned on her heel and began walking back, her mouth dry, her lips all chalky. Jim caught up, his shirt flapping as he drew up beside her.

  No, he said, but I’ve been thinking about it a long time. About you and me and him. And it’s like a test. Christ, I’ve tried to make myself over and here’s the situation. Prove to myself that I’m different—and get free. At least in my head. In White Point, no matter what I do, I’m still my father’s son. Half the time I think it myself. You need a moment, something that defines you.

  And what am I, the witness to your symbolic moment?

  Won’t we both get what we want?

  Georgie didn’t answer. She was repelled by him now but she wanted to believe that it was possible.

  THE MOMENT FOX WAKES in the cool blue light of dawn he goes to the drone. He greets every day with music and likewise bids it goodbye at sunset. Hunting and eating become diversions. His technique develops the better he understands the flexibility of the tree until, by leaning hip and shoulder against the trunk, he can alter the string’s pitch and slur notes gently or wildly in a smooth, fretless sound that’s not quite Eberhard Weber or Stanley Clarke but superior to any jug band tea-chest bass and subtler than any bottleneck slide he managed in his playing days. Early on the droning was exuberant but now it’s wistful. He sings the gloss of Georgie’s skin, the hot rush of her laugh. His digressions from the plangent monotone are like meandering treks in a minor key, embroideries he can barely manage to return from. In trying to match it, his voice becomes thin and birdlike. The music develops a pattern whose order just eludes him. He knows it’s there, feels himself always at the brink of comprehending it the way he stands at the shore with a scallop shell seeing its patterns repeated in the sandy-ribbed bottom and in the fluted shoreline and the sandstone ranges. He sings until he’s hoarse, until he wonders whether the tree isn’t bending him now, if he’s the singer or the sung.

  At night the stars wheel ever westward. Mostly they’re just texture. But sometimes he stares so hard and attains such crisp focus that he sees them as the places and bodies they are. They lie there in sheets, before and beyond each other, interleaved in their bronze, gold, silver, pink, blue facets, in mosaic overlaps like the scales of a fish. At moments like these the sky has an awful depth of field, an inwardness that makes him afraid that he’s falling out into it, about to be inhaled like a dust mote. He digs his fingers into the dirt either side of his swag as he lies there overcome with vertigo. He holds to the earth by his nails and his clenched buttocks for fear of tilting out into space.

  Some mornings he has to unglue his eyes by bathing them in fresh water. One of them feels lumpy and his eyelid irritates it every time he blinks. He lubricates it with soothing drips from his dwindling tin of olive oil but this leaves a cloud over his eye and he feels his peripheral vision shrink. Paddling the kayak through mangroves one afternoon he doesn’t see a croc until it’s almost at his elbow. A couple of mud bubbles on the shadow-latticed surface are transformed in a second into the snout and eyes of a great saurian bastard not a metre from his hip. Fox slams the paddle blade so hard between its eyes he nearly tips out. As it rolls and flees in surprise, all flashing pale belly and armoured tail, he sees it’s bigger than the kayak and the surge of displaced water shunts him sideways, cocked to the verge of capsize. It ploughs through the trees to leave him shaking.

  But he persists in the mangroves despite the fear of crocs because the tree canopy offers shade and camouflage and his hunger grows more nagging. He catches small barramundi on handlines and lures mangrove crabs from the mud. The crabmeat is rich and he savours the cheesy orange roe.

  Sometimes he finds himself floating through the trees doing nothing at all. Thinking of the orange blossoms of the Christmas tree, for instance, or the scalloped ridges on Georgie’s fingernails.

  He loses his voice. A fever comes upon him. For a few days he just lies on his swag, shivering. Now and then a quoll looks down on him from a crevice in the rock shelter. Like a big, handsome, red rat, it appears osmotically from the sandstone, its ginger fur starred with white spots, one five-toed forefoot splayed on the ledge. Fox likes its glistening protuberant eyes. If he even breathes the quoll disappears as though inhaled by the stone itself, and he almost cries every time it goes.

  The air shimmers. Georgie Jutland breathes into his mouth. She tastes of food that he’s cooked for her. She lies hot across him, her hipbones creaking against his. Those sad, changeable green eyes. When she leaves with her shining steel guitar, a train of silver fishes follows in her wake. Now and then he sees her at the shore, sees himself there, too. They’re like trees. They are trees. All morning they reel their shadows in from the west only to troll them ever eastwards across the shell bed in the afternoon.

  At dusk he gets up and shuffles down to stand beside himself. He touches her, breathes in her nutty odour, shudders as his hip brushes hers. He presses his brow against her bark and puts one clear eye against her, thinking, this is a tree you
moron, and slinks back to his swag. But he comes back in the moonlight to hold it anyway. It’s warm-blooded even after dark and its skin so smooth, its clefts so sculpted. He watches himself looking on from lower boughs. He sees a naked creature swimming up against a tree, holding its slim hips and pressing himself to it. A ragged man with flayed shanks whose sudden tiny cry in the night is no louder than the gasp of an opened oyster.

  THE PLANE FELT as if it would never fly. It roared across the listless river while the barefoot pilot rocked and cajoled the thing and finally levered it by stages into the air. The dam wall flashed beneath them. Irrigation channels caught the sun. The plantation town of Kununurra was a weird, virescent swathe in the ochre landscape, a few moments of rigid geometry that fell away in seconds and afterwards seemed imaginary. The aircraft’s shadow rippled across the Carr Boyd Ranges. Over the country beyond—the parched savannah, the yellow floodplains, the spare khaki blotches of acacia, the spinifex and red dirt and the dry snakeskin rivers—hung a veil of smoke. It looked to Georgie as though the entire Kimberley was smouldering, and the haze only added to the madness of the distances, the disorder of the view.

  The cabin air was hot and tainted. The harness felt heavy on her, its buckles and latches daunting. The headphones hurt her ears but the engine noise was worse. She sat amidst styrofoam boxes of food and watched Jim’s head swivel from window to pilot to the dials in the dash. He’d been tense and anxious all morning. At the hotel he’d shoved a man aside when he staggered clumsily into their luggage. His lips were chapped from being licked. About an hour into the flight he snatched a foil-lined bag from the floor and shoved his face into it. From behind she watched his neck convulse. Last night he was drunk and sullen. He’d wanted sex. She held him off with talk. She knew he hadn’t slept then, that he’d stayed up drinking, that something wasn’t right with him. And now she wished they could just arrive and be there and have happen whatever would happen so she wouldn’t be reduced to interpreting and rethinking the spasms in his neck. The seaplane felt suspended; its only perceptible motion the horrid upward lunges in the heat. The scale of the land below stole any sense of progress. She closed her eyes in order to endure it.

  Another hour passed. The gulf emerged from the haze as a blue gash in the land. Georgie saw the archipelago, she picked her island without a moment’s hesitation but there was no shiver of recognition as before. True, she felt relief, but also a pang of disappointment.

  The plane skidded and skipped across the water. Spray beaded on the windows, and then they taxied around a headland into a white shelly cove where a man stood waiting.

  Red Hopper brought them into the shade of his thatched shelter, sat them at the table and poured two tin mugs of iced water.

  He was the same big ginger bloke that Georgie remembered. His features were pugnacious, you could easily imagine him with his dander up, but his face was brightened by a steady sardonic amusement that rendered him instantly likeable. He wore a long-billed cap that was stained with salt and he had the wide, crusty feet of a man who rarely wore shoes. The shorts and tee-shirt were bog-standard western male get-up but the red bandana round his neck was close to flamboyant. His fingers were scarred and blunt and his nails were bitten to the quick.

  White Point, he said with a rueful laugh. I know it. Got me head kicked in at the pub when I was nineteen. They take no prisoners in that town. So much for the temperate zone, eh?

  The water tasted sandy and sweet. Georgie saw the two men size each other up.

  The camp was an open-sided bough shelter built at the mouth of a wide, low cave. Red Hopper ran an orderly outfit. There were kitchen benches, a steel sink, fridge and freezer, plenty of stacked utensils and the loose shell floor was raked and clean. Overhead a brace of baitcasting rods and a bewildering array of lures hung within arm’s reach. Along the swept rock ledge, beside bottles of sunblock and insect repellent and a serious-looking medical kit, were the two HF radio units that Georgie presumed were the only link with the world beyond. Next to the radios were books and magazines whose pages were curled and wrinkled with humidity. The books were mostly about tides, birds and fish but they included what looked to be the entire oeuvre of Hunter S. Thompson.

  Not a bad set-up, said Jim.

  Well, if you’re a fisherman, anyway, said the guide.

  I am.

  That’s right, the guide said mischievously. So you are.

  I’m afraid we’ve met before, Red, said Georgie. She felt Jim’s head swivel. It was a few years ago. You towed us off the spit out near that big island.

  Hopper thumbed his cap back and looked frankly at her for the first time.

  You probably don’t remember, she said.

  I thought you were Americans.

  Well, one of us was.

  I’ll be buggered. How far’d you get?

  They sank it at Lombok, said Jim.

  Well, said Red diplomatically. He was a character, that fella.

  Georgie could only smile.

  Listen, said Jim. About this week.

  You’ve paid for the week. Doesn’t mean you have to stay the seven days. And like I said, I’m used to finding fish, not people.

  I understand that. But you know the country.

  Well, the coast. I know the gulf and the plateau. This bloke doesn’t owe you money or anythin, does he?

  Jim took a gulp of water.

  I mean, I’m assumin this is some sort of rescue mission and not somethin…untoward, as they say.

  He’s someone we need to make contact with, said Jim.

  About ten years ago someone tried growin dope way the hell back in the islands out there. I found tools and irrigation pipe—

  It’s nothing like that.

  Which is what makes me wonder, Jim. About why there’ll just be the three of us lookin. You could’ve had choppers and boats, a full-scale search. Black trackers, the whole circus.

  It’s a private thing, said Jim.

  Yeah, I gathered. But a bloke can’t help but be curious. Spose that’s why I took you on.

  Not the fact that I tripled your usual fee? asked Jim with a mirthless grin.

  And how can that douse a bloke’s curiosity? By the way, I took the liberty of havin your bags searched in Kununurra. Not polite, but there it is.

  What the hell for? asked Jim rearing upright in his chair.

  And I don’t spose either of you carried a firearm on you when you boarded the plane?

  No, said Georgie who felt herself turn to Jim.

  Course not, he muttered.

  A bloke has to take a few precautions, that’s all.

  We understand, said Georgie.

  You think this guy wants to be found?

  She shrugged.

  He’s a white fella?

  What difference does it make? Jim asked.

  Well, for a couple of years pilots’ve been sayin they see someone up and down this country. You know, right back in the rough stuff, places you never see people. But he’s a blackfella. You have to take what they say with a grain of salt. They’re mostly young blokes. They like a story.

  Well, what would be so remarkable about seeing an Aborigine up here? said Georgie. Most of it’s native land anyway, isn’t it?

  I’m no expert, said the guide. But for one thing, you couldn’t fill a Japanese car with the number of blackfellas who still have the bush skills to live out in that sort of wilderness for years at a time. And of that carload, most of those blokes’d be too old to walk or see anymore. And for another thing, it’s not very common for blackfellas to go out and live alone for any great period. In my experience they don’t have a passion for getting away from other people and communing with nature. They like each other’s company.

  What’s this got to do with why we’re here? asked Jim impatiently.

  Because those reports from earlier in the season were of a white bloke.

  He’s white, said Georgie. His name is Luther Fox and he’s thirty-five years old.

&nb
sp; Makes sense. You know, I didn’t believe em, not at first. But I know he’s out there. He’s been here.

  You mean you’ve seen him? said Georgie.

  No. He’s been flogging stuff from the camp.

  That’s our man, said Jim with a bitter laugh.

  How’s that?

  Family tradition. God helps those who help themselves—to what belongs to somebody else.

  Red Hopper grinned. Georgie could see the way he looked at Jim, as though he was trying to decide something about him.

  Could hardly blame a bloke, the guide murmured. Whatever he took has probably kept him alive. If he is still alive.

  I think I know where he is, said Georgie.

  It was a thirty-minute run in Red Hopper’s aluminium barra boat. There was a mild chop on the water but the occasional bit of spray came as cool relief. She watched the way the guide took his polaroids off to lick the blurring salt from the lenses while continuing to steer. Jim looked uncomfortable with someone else at the helm.

  The full light of afternoon lay on the island’s orange-red crags. It lit the crowded treetops of its vegetation. The glare from the scalloped shell beach was punishing. The guide pointed out the ruins of an ancient boab destroyed by lightning and he led them up through the rainforest toward the base of the bluff.

  He’s been here, said Red. Look at these trails he’s made.

  And you told him about this place? Jim asked Georgie.

  Told you too, she murmured.

  I don’t recall.

  They climbed from a snarl of vines onto a stone ledge that ran along the foot of the mesa. They came to a stagnant puddle of water and, further along, the remains of a camp. Ash from cooking fires was mounded on the dirt of the terrace. There were shells and pieces of stick bound with gelspun line. A few bits of bleached coral, some tattered palm weavings. In the fine dirt beneath the low rock overhang was a long depression, the imprint of a body. Georgie knelt beside it. It felt strange to be there, to see his outline. There was a dull twang behind her. Jim stood at the wizened fig tree with his thumb on a bit of nylon leader tied between two boughs.