Eccleston led him through the fence and the colt stepped up onto the truck, his long head nodding up and down, flanks and shoulders quivering and glistening in the scant light. Eccleston wrapped the rope around the rail the other horses were tethered to. Possum lifted the ramp and slid the gate shut and pinned it. Eccleston walked around the side of the truck and climbed up on the wheel and scuttled across the deck untying the horses.
“Let em ride loose. They’ll settle on the road.”
He eyed the black colt.
“Bloody hell, that’s a horse,” he said under his breath.
Grey put his foot on the cabin stair and reached for the top of the seat and the pain went right through him. He fell into the cabin. With cuttings of wire Thiebaud and Eccleston made bull-wire knots and twisted three of the fence wires up sufficient to keep the other horses from the road.
They piled into the truck and Possum pulled back up onto the asphalt. The engine worked hard with the load of horses and the boys winced at the sound. They all of them looked again in the direction of Tanner’s house. They met the Valley Highway and turned back to the north. Car lights flashed in the distance. When he saw the lights Eccleston reached across Possum and turned on their own lights. The car drew close and then passed, the boys and Possum all looking down to see what it contained. But the car kept innocently on, so perhaps it was only some disoriented tourist.
Possum stopped the truck on the road outside Eccleston’s and Grey handed Possum three hundred dollars cash for the trip and shook his hand and the boys got out.
Possum would head west from there on dirt roads until Gatton.
“Then get back on the highway,” said Eccleston. “Take the highway in the dark and the back roads in the daylight.”
Possum nodded. Eccleston spoke a single word of a language none of the others understood and clasped the old black man’s hand. Then the boys shook hands and Eccleston and Thiebaud stepped quickly along the way to the white house on stilts and Grey walked in pain across the grass and then along the gravel to his own house.
He supported his elbow and the weight of his left arm in his right hand. He knew he had broken his collarbone, and that he would have to endure the pain for a week before telling a doctor or anyone else in town about it. He took off his clothes and ran a hot shower.
He wondered where Possum was by now. He went to sleep on his feet in the steaming water.
He boiled water for tea on the potbelly stove. The whistling kettle woke Irene. She came into the living room rubbing her eyes.
“Don’t turn on the light.”
“Where’ve you been?’ She saw his arm in a sling made of an old shirt. “What happened?”
“I got into a fight. You can’t tell anyone.”
Irene nodded and asked nothing else, though there were tears in her eyes.
She stayed up with Grey and drank tea and then laid a blanket over him in his bed. She pushed his hair from his face and smiled at him. His eyes had been open and staring at the ceiling, but at the touch of her hand he closed them.
A WEEK PASSED. Grey asked his father where the money should be paid. He did not trust him with so large a sum as was in the yellow envelope he collected from Eccleston’s that morning.
He drove east on Highway 54, past the abattoir and pylons
and an unpainted concrete brothel to the hotel whose address his father had written on the back of the envelope.
The barman eyed Grey suspiciously then led him past bikies and off-duty police unloading the cash they could not bank into poker machines. The police and bikies sat shoulder to shoulder with retirees and pensioner women with purple-rinsed hair. Between the games they stared indifferently along with the pensioners at a television playing soap operas above the bar.
The barman told Grey to wait at the stairs. A girl with a broken lip and a closed eye walked down the stairs and into the night. The bartender came down and motioned upstairs with his thumb.
Grey knocked on a door and asked for Mr. H. That man was not in. Grey would wait. He waited an hour to deliver the envelope personally to a bald, well-dressed man with an untidy peroxide blonde on his arm.
“This is from Bill North,” Grey said.
“Drink?’ asked the man, turning his back to Grey and taking a bottle of cognac from his shelf. Grey had the feeling the man was modelling himself after a gangster from a movie.
“No thanks. Why don’t you count the money?”
The man smiled warmly.
“Really, I trust you, boy.”
“I’ve gone to the trouble of delivering it. You count it.”
The bald man exchanged glances and smiles with the prostitute and another man in a pin-striped suit who Grey guessed was the accountant.
“If you knew me better, you wouldn’t speak that way.”
“I don’t want to get to know you. I want you to count the money in the envelope.”
The man snapped his fingers and the accountant brought out a red ledger then sat back down at the table.
While the man counted the money, Grey took in his manicured nails and trimmed eyebrows, then the vaguely masculine features of the blonde prostitute. Their eyes met. She looked at
him dully and played with the gold bracelets on her wrist. Again, it was as though they were all acting parts in a movie. Grey felt like laughing. He felt absurd, sitting here above the pensioners who probably delivered the bald man as much money as his crimes. The scene was so juvenile and droll, but the danger was the child, the rich child who sat before him who did not see that this was a joke. Grey guessed he posed in the mirror before leaving the house, cried at the lyrics of popular love songs, but might shoot you if you laughed at his shoes.
“Correct?”
“Correct,” said the man.
Grey stood up and left the room. He walked down the stairs into the bar and took a shot of Scotch then walked back into the ugly suburban night.
Another week passed. Then a month. The police investigation into the stolen horses barely existed. Some questions that were easily answered were asked of everyone within ten miles of the town. And no more was spoken by newspapers or men of the theft of horses from the property of a small-time Mary Smokes horse dealer.
XIII
THE MARY SMOKES WORKERS’ CLUB WAS A DIM-LIT THREE-PLY box attached to the backside of shops on Banjalang Street, where the same beers that sold for three dollars at the hotel sold for two.
Grey walked in and saw August Tanner sitting alone at a corner table. Tanner never drank here; only poor boys, the town’s few Aborigines, and loose girls. It was the first time Grey had seen Tanner since the night of the horses. Their eyes met and Grey nodded. He felt an urge to go and talk, but he told himself he must be careful not to be over-friendly, he must act as he always would. Eccleston came in shortly after. He sat at Grey’s table with his back to Tanner. They drank beer and smoked. They spoke of nothing out of the ordinary–hunting, horses, and jokes at Raughrie Norman’s expense–though their thoughts were always with the man sitting at the other side of the room. When Grey next went to the bar Tanner stood up too and sat down with Eccleston. Grey heard the conversation over his shoulder.
“I had some work lined up for you the other day, Ook.”
“ What work was that?”
“Handlin some horses for me. Only they got stolen. You heard about that.”
“Of course. Shame.”
“Yep. For you too.”
“Why’s that?”
“I reckon you could’ve used the money.”
Grey turned to see Eccleston shrug dismissively.
“I’m used to not havin money. I can do without it.”
Grey came back to the table with three shot glasses and half a bottle of Scotch whisky. Tanner nodded to him and took a glass and turned again to Eccleston.
“The four were just horses. But there was a black colt with em. That horse was worth more than you, Ook. Its blood was purer.” Tanner sighed. “Well, now he’s gone. How bloody complacent a man becomes. I should’ve had him in the stable. I thought the best place to hide a tree was in the woods. I was proud of that wisdom. And now all I can think of is some ignorant ringer usin him for a stockhorse, some cocky leadin his daughter round a houseyard on him. Well that just makes me–” he clenched his fist but stopped short of banging the table. He set his palm down gently. “I tell you, Ook. If I had’ve caught the son of a whore that did it, he’d’ve known he was alive–for about two minutes before he realized he wasn’t anymore.”
Tanner took a deep breath and calmed himself.
“So you owned em outright?’ Eccleston knew the answer.
“They were mine. But not the black colt. It was necessary that horse should come through me, appear on my books. The vendor and buyer are both very difficult men to deal with. I tell you, Ook, the whole week after the theft I woke in cold sweats at the thought of explainin to em.”
Perhaps Tanner had been testing him, but Eccleston’s face had given nothing, and now it seemed like the old man only wanted to vent his worries.
“You’ve got insurance,” Eccleston declared.
“For the horses. Not the colt. The colt was a dead racehorse.”
Eccleston raised his eyebrows.
“Disqualified,” said Tanner. “Banned. Never to run again.”
“How’d he die?”
“Irregular heart beat. It was all the chemicals they fed him.”
“That’d do it.”
“I tell you, Ook, the time and effort I put into changin that
brand, a work of art it was, and all for nothin. When he was alive and racin he only had a little star on his forehead, and when he was stolen he had a full white blaze. That I did with dye and a razor blade. They couldn’t a got a better man than me. And look how it turned out.”
Eccleston recalled the horse now. The story had made the shire news-sheet; no doubt the papers in the city too.
“Perhaps you don’t sympathize with me, Ook.”
“I’ve got no love for horseracing–honest or otherwise.”
Tanner sneezed. He pointed out the back door.
“West wind. I always get hay fever in a west wind. That wind was blowin the night the horses were stolen. I was bedridden. Couldn’t hear anything. If not for that …’ Tanner spat on the floor. “Keep your ear to the ground, Ook. You get around. You might hear somethin.”
“I doubt it. Seems to me like they were out-of-towners.”
“You never know. There are people round here in want of money. And the colt’s not a horse anyone’d be likely to buy off the back of a truck–not for a hundredth part of his value. I got a suspicion they were amateurs.”
“Maybe.” Eccleston sipped his whisky. “How difficult are these blokes you’re dealin with? You’re a bastard of a man, always have been, but I’d just as well have you alive as dead.”
“I don’t know much about the vendor. The buyer–What I do know I suddenly hope isn’t true. You’ve seen him. He was at my house the last time you broke horses for me.”
Eccleston remembered the man with slick, thinning hair and dark sunglasses. Tanner knitted his brow and squinted and rubbed his grey chin stubble with visible pain.
“I’d buy the horse back if I could, Ook. I’d buy him back for twenty grand cash. I only tell you this so you can put the word out. Like I say, you know people.”
Eccleston fixed Tanner’s eyes.
“I don’t know where your horse is, old man.”
Tanner stood up from his chair.
“Well, I’ll leave you boys alone.”
Then he was gone onto the street.
“What do you think?’ Grey whispered.
“I reckon it’s crossed his mind,” said Eccleston. “But he doesn’t know. And we don’t have to worry about the police. He would of rung em in a panic when he first saw the horses gone, but he’ll be more scared of em finding the colt now than anything else. It’d raise questions the old man sure as hell doesn’t want to answer. I bet he’s been scolded by his associate for ringin em in the first place.”
“ What chance you think he knows?”
“He’d say if he knew for sure. This far on. I reckon he doesn’t.”
“It’s goin on two months.”
Eccleston nodded.
“Possum told me he’s never got away cleaner. He drove all the way to Dalby. Sold the horses all to one man. He never had to leave a name, not even a fake one.”
Grey breathed a sigh of relief.
He took up the amber bottle in front of him and filled both their glasses. Eccleston took the shot in a gulp.
“What’s Irene up to tonight?”
“She’s at home,” said Grey.
“You know, Irene’s–”
“Don’t speak of her here, Ook.”
Eccleston stared at him.
“Why can’t I say her name?”
“Just not here.”
“All right.”
Grey went home and Eccleston stayed another hour by himself, taking straight whisky very slowly and deliberately at the bar until the bottle Grey bought was empty. Then he danced with a plump local girl and part-time prostitute. Then there was an argument with the bartender and he put his fist through a wall. Then he walked home alone.
WITHIN A FORTNIGHT Grey heard that the card game at Dinmore had packed up, for what reason he would never know. Perhaps it had returned to the city. Oats and wheat were sown and shot where sorghum had been. At dusk and dawn a burning freshness filled the nostrils. The skies were higher. There was a quickening of the breath and blood. And a day came when Grey looked at the calendar in the living room and realized Vanessa was back at school. Even in holiday time they lived far enough apart never to meet by chance, and he had vaguely excused himself from both her invitations before she left.
His days passed much as they ever had, running with the boys of Mary Smokes in the forgotten town whose smallness constricted their aspirations. Then one day late in May a wind came and blew the long summer away for good. The wind came from out of the inland and blew mares’ tails across the sky and swept and yellowed the grass and banished the rains so the rivers and creeks became still and then dry, and then the lake receded and left flats of cracking clay. A mist rose up from the dry bed of Mary Smokes Creek like the ghost of water and drifted through the eucalypts of the gallery. The old men said the creek had dried earlier than ever this year. And as suddenly as these changes in the weather, a day came when Irene did not wait for him at the school gate. That day was followed by another. Then she did not follow him around on Saturday nights or even annoy him at the service station.