“It was the first on the road.”
“Did you see the bill?”
He shook his head. He did not know the bill had come.
“It worked out to three grand.”
Grey had not been inside a hospital for fifteen years until that night. He imagined that in an emergency, for those without the means to pay, bed and treatment must cost nothing. His wildest speculation would not have reached three thousand dollars.
“I couldn’t pay, Grey. I knew you couldn’t either. I went to Tanner.”
“Damn it, old man. Surely the hospital would let you pay the money back in stages? Better to owe them money than Tanner.”
Bill North had stopped crying now.
Grey breathed deeply.
“So you owe Tanner three grand?”
“I don’t owe him anything. He wouldn’t lend it. He introduced me at a card game at Dinmore.”
Grey was silent. His father looked up.
“I won, Grey. I won big. I quit as soon as I got the sum of the bill. I sent the check the next day. But I went back tonight. I reckoned my luck was in. They suckered me. I tell you, it was for her. I know I’ve been nothin to you two. If only your mother’d lived and it was me who died, your lives would’ve been different. She was clever and decent. She could’ve reared you both properly, not left you on your own. But just once I wanted to do somethin to lift you up a little out of the state I’ve let you fall to. I’m a weak and stupid man, Grey. I know you believe it. You’re right to. But just once I thought I might ...” He raised his head and his bloodshot eyes stared through the wall. “It was for her, Grey. She’s
a livin accusation. All I wanted to do was see things righted someway, and then before I knew it I’d bet more than I had. Then much more. And those men in there … the one who runs the table … he runs vice in the city. I don’t know what he’s capable of. I’d shoot myself here and now if it wouldn’t leave us in a worse mess. I swear to God, I’d do it.”
“How much do you owe?”
“Six thousand.” The man met his son’s gaze. Then he put his head in his hands again. “Near seven.”
Grey closed his eyes.
“Do they know you haven’t got it?”
“I couldn’t tell em that.”
“When are you meant to pay?”
“I’ve got three weeks. It’s gotta be cash. But, Grey. He knows I have a daughter. He runs all kinds of vice in the city–a brothel on the outskirts full of underage Filipinos. I’ve heard it! If a man’ll do that … And what about that bloke who got killed on the highway in January … The police never caught anyone … I heard rumours. I’m tired, Grey. So bloody tired.”
His father was confused and ranting. Grey thought it could not be as bad as what he said. But when he walked down the corridor and looked in on his sleeping sister he felt his stomach pull tight.
He came back to the living room and picked his father up by the shirt collar and threw him against the wall. He believed he would hit him. But he felt pain at his father reduced to nothing in his hands. He could not hit him or even look him in the eye.
“Go to bed,” he said.
He took a half-bottle of Scotch from the table and handed it to the man and told him again.
Before Grey left the house he returned to his sleeping sister and kissed her cheek. He thought how awfully simple all this was. And now how difficult.
XI
GREY AND ECCLESTON SAT UP THROUGH THE NIGHT WITH an electric lamp and a tin can ashtray between them on Eccleston’s kitchen table. Eccleston broke bits of a rotten cabinet and fed the potbelly stove. A roll of newspaper gave a false flourish and then the lacquered wood hissed and spat and gave green flame. They drank black tea poured from a pot on the stove into tin cups. A moth flew in through a paneless window and lighted on the lampshade.
“Tanner is about to take delivery of a deck of quarter horses,” said Eccleston. “Four-year-olds. He’s bought em out of his own pocket. He got caught with em when a client backed out on a deal. He doesn’t know I know. I overheard it a week ago at the hotel in Toogoolawah. The rate was three grand a head. Pos might get us somethin like half that, no matter how good the horses are. Blokes who buy horses off the backs of trucks from blackfellas without papers know they’ve got to be sold quick. But Pos knows people we can sell em to. He’s done it before.”
“I’ve got five hundred I can put toward the debt. The old man’s got a couple of head of cattle he can sell. We won’t need the full deck.”
“No. Four or five horses. Six to be safe.”
“Will Tanner peg it on us?”
“A lot of blokes know he has the horses. Worse blokes than us.”
Grey watched the moth teetering on the inner rim of the lampshade.
He did not want to involve Possum. He had not wanted to involve Eccleston. But he did not know what kind of men these were that his father had become indebted to. His father had been drunk and hysterical. But what if they were truly in danger–and by “they’ he meant her alone. Then he would have demanded the names of the men and gone and shot them this night if that would stop it.
“Does Pos see well enough to drive at night?”
“Almost.” Eccleston smiled. “But he drives all right. Pos can sell the horses. I don’t know if we can. You or me’d draw attention askin about buyers. The people Pos knows are out west. And there’s a limit to how far the police will go lookin. Especially for an old blackfella who might not have an address and might disappear into the bush for months, and who most blokes couldn’t pick from any other blackfella you stood beside him. But like I say, horses are easy enough for Pos to sell. He knows men who’ll put em on trucks at a cattle saleyards where trucks pull up right through the night and no one’ll ask any questions. A half-dozen horses’ll be taken from nowhere to nowhere else. Maybe for twelve hundred dollars a head.”
Eccleston looked up.
“Is it enough?”
“It’s enough.”
“They’re broken, and I reckon they’ll be well handled. They’ll be catchable. They’re in the front paddock on the highway. But there’s an access road goin into the hills. You know it. Once they’re settled they’ll camp in the trees near the creek, not far from that road. Tanner keeps the paddock locked up. The gate chain’s that heavy and tight it’d be tough to cut even with bolt cutters. We’ll have to cut the fenceline. He might not notice a cut fence for a few hours the next mornin. The truck’ll have time to get away, before Tanner realises he’s missin horses and goes lookin for em. We’ll need one other man. Not Flagon.”
“No, not Flagon. If we decide, I’ll talk to Thiebaud.”
“We don’t have much to decide, do we?’ Eccleston sighed. “Be discreet, Grey. Tanner’s a fool, but the men around him may not be. Say nothin to no one.”
Grey nodded and sipped the sweet tea.
“What do you think my old man meant when he said this bloke’s dangerous?”
“I don’t know. From what I’ve heard these crime blokes can be as temperamental as children. They might make a big show of gettin a debt back, but then, they might do nothin at all, at least for a while.” He sighed. “But finally, they’ll insist on gettin paid.”
Eccleston did not tell Grey what he had learned at Borallon those years ago. That the moonlight state men used delinquent boys, bikies and ex-inmates to do their dirtiest jobs: men who were not smart enough to stay out of prison or find any other way of getting by. These, once let lose, were uncontrollable. And he did not say he knew a boy from Borallon who was hired to “shadow” a man who owed a bookmaker money; to shoot rat-shot on his roof in the middle of the night, to scratch messages into the panels of his car, and follow his son home from school. Grey looked troubled enough, so Eccleston did not mention these things.
“But I don’t know what the blokes at Dinmore are capable of,” he said in answer to his own thoughts.
“I’d never ask, Ook.”
Eccleston smiled. He tapped the base of the lamp that had flickered off and the filament lit again.
“You’re all I have, Grey. You and the boys, and Irene.”
Grey did not need to say it was the same for him. He only nodded. He sighed deeply. He rolled a cigarette and struck a match and read the dial of his watch by its light. He lit the cigarette and gave it to Eccleston and rolled another for himself.
The lamp became unnecessary. The moth had disappeared without Grey’s noticing.
“Don’t tell, Irene, Ook.”
Eccleston nodded. Grey frowned.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t need to say that.”
He stood up from the table and said goodnight and stepped out into the morning twilight.
XII
THEY WAITED FOR THE NEXT NEW MOON. AT ELEVEN A shredded blanket of cloud separated earth from stars. Wind thumped across the plain from the dry west. The boys climbed into an unregistered bodytruck that Possum had borrowed from a cousin in Lockyer. An outdated set of number plates was on the floor of the cabin, ready to be switched with the present ones tomorrow. The boys drank from a silver flask of whisky to keep warm. They drove toward Highway 54 and turned east down a dirt road. They switched off the headlights and cut the engine and rolled a half-mile in the dark. They eased the truck off the road and down the embankment, close to the fence and the paddock where Tanner’s horses stood watching them from their camp.
Eccleston took a pair of pliers from the cabin and cut the three lines of barb and two of plainwire. He cut three inches before the hitches on a split-post and he bent the loose lengths back around a steel post, making a clean ten-foot gap in the fenceline. Grey and Thiebaud collected halters and ropes from the back of the truck, and Possum broke two biscuits of sweet-smelling lucerne hay.
The cloud cover held despite the wind. If anyone passed on the road, all the boys could do was fall to the ground and hope the grass and the dark obscured them. Tanner’s house was a half-mile south across Mary Smokes Creek. The lights were all out. On a still night the house was within hearing distance.
The boys hoped the wind that shredded the clouds and whistled in the gullies would obscure their sounds.
They stepped toward the horses. There was a break in the cloud and the stars lit twelve blue-tinged chestnut colts and fillies. The boys became nervous at the clear sight of each other and the horses. Then the starlight was gone again.
Grey broke a hay biscuit and gave half to Eccleston.
Eccleston squatted and whispered and clicked his tongue and held the hay out to the wind and one of the horses lifted its head and turned in the direction of the voice and the boys’ hearts beat fast when it came and the others followed.
“Each is as good as the other,” Eccleston said to the boys.
Grey drew up to a filly. He squatted below the horse’s eye level and looked down at his boots and back to the horse and away again and offered the hay with his extended arm. He shuffled closer and then the filly was sniffing and then nibbling at the hay and Grey scratched her nose and forehead. He rose slowly and stroked the mane. He eased the halter over her ears but the filly snorted and threw her head and the halter fell to the ground.
“Easy, girl. Easy, easy, easy,” Grey pleaded.
He re-caught the horse and rubbed his thumb in the concave between its eyes to settle it and fitted the halter and began to lead her. The colt Eccleston was handling whinnied into the wind and stamped hard on the ground. It was a small noise but it seemed tremendous tonight. Grey rechecked the direction of the wind. The sound might not carry far into this, he thought.
“Horses might stir in the night for any reason,” Eccleston whispered as they came to the fence, reading his thoughts. Grey nodded.
“A fox or stray dog.”
“The wind.”
The boys led their horses to the truck where Possum had let down the ramp. They had lain thin mattress on the loading ramp and deck to mute the clattering of hooves. The boys and
Possum looked across to Tanner’s house, waiting, expecting, dreading the light that might come on there. But there was no light.
Eccleston’s and Grey’s horses were loaded, and Grey went to help Possum load Thiebaud’s horse and got caught behind it and the horse kicked his shoulder. He fell back with a muted gasp of pain and Eccleston came and raised his head from the dirt. The kick took all the wind from Grey’s lungs and his mouth opened wide but admitted only a snatch of breath, and the panic of reaching for air and not finding it came into his eyes. Eccleston rubbed Grey’s chest and then Grey found his breath and got to his feet. Eccleston loaded and tethered Thiebaud’s horse and Grey led a horse Possum had caught. When the horse pulled back on the lead rope and forced him to use his shoulder he winced.
Hoof thuds and snorts came from the paddock and the boys saw a smoky-black thoroughbred colt pacing the fenceline.
Eccleston spat.
“Damn that horse. He’s gonna wake up the house.”
Grey squinted into the dark. The horse looked sixteen-and-a-half hands high.
“He’s not one of these,” said Eccleston.
“What’ll we do?”
“We’ll take him now he’s up here. He’ll be the last one. I don’t want to frig around any longer.”
Grey nodded.
Eccleston walked back into the paddock and focused on the black colt. Even at distance and in the dark the boys could all see what a horse he was, despite an overlong and badly hacked mane: not sixteen-and-a-half but seventeen hands high, and with a white blaze and black coat that flashed in the scraps of starlight that were thrown more frequently earthward now.
With a biscuit of lucerne and tongue clicks Eccleston drew the horse to him. The colt was flighty but curious, and the easiest of the horses to bring within reach. Eccleston stroked its
forehead and threw the lead rope around its neck in case the horse spooked. Then he fitted the halter. The colt pulled back and whinnied and grumbled but Eccleston dug his heels and whispered gently and held tight to the rope, and the colt quieted. The boys looked across at the house. Still there was no light.