Dirt Music (36 page)

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.

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.

It’s him, she said.

He’s long gone, murmured the guide.

That your skillet?

Yep, Hopper said with a smile.

They looked out across the treetops. Behind its levee of mangroves the nearby mainland was spiky and dry.

So few trees there, said Georgie. And it’s like jungle here.

Fire, said Red. You get patches of rainforest over there, too, but only in the lee of big breakaways where the wind can’t blow the fire. Funny thing is, there’s more water over there than here.

Which is why he’s gone, said Jim.

That and he saw us coming. You can see clear to the plateau from here, He’s probably been gone since I first showed up this season.

Jesus, he could be bloody anywhere, said Jim.

Anywhere there’s food and water.

Somewhere on the island?

Nah. No water.

My guess is he’s camped along a creek or on the coast where he’s found a spring. Some place he can fish. He’s got himself a boat somehow. He’s no idiot.

Georgie thumbed the string in the tree. Oh. Oh. She felt the guide watching. Even when it stopped vibrating the breeze soughed over it enough to make her smile.

So what now?

It’s nearly beer o’clock, said Red. And I have to catch your dinner on the way home.

We can catch our own dinner, said Jim.

Well, said Red, that remains to be seen. That evening they ate panfried fillets from the barramundi the guide had boated in the last of the light. Both of them had lost fish, Georgie from preoccupation and lack of conviction and Jim from uncharacteristic impatience. But the sight of Red’s fish leaping into the air with its gillplates flashing and rattling had stirred her. The fishing guide laughed as though it was the first fish he’d caught in his life; there was no need to ask him why he did this for a living.

After dinner they sat out under the stars while the tide burbled up the beach.

Tomorrow, said the guide as they sipped their beers, we’ll start working through all the freshwater spots. That’s all we can do, really.

What are our chances of finding this bloke? asked Jim.

If he doesn’t wanna be found? Nil. Might find his camp but all he’s gotta do is hide. He’s smart enough. He’ll hear us coming for miles.

Jim stirred. Bloke’s stealing your gear and it sounds like you admire him.

Hopper laughed. Well, you gotta hand it to him. Besides, it keeps you guessin. You should hear my clients talk about him. The pilots get em all wound up. Half the punters are lying in their swags at night waitin to get their throats cut. Seven days of freedom and safety and they’re fangin to get back to Sydney or wherever. They appreciate it, though. He gives em an excuse to be scared.

That didn’t make a lick of sense to me, said Georgie with a self-conscious laugh.

It’s like this, said Red. Half the people who fly in here for a week’s mad-dog sportfishin—at iniquitous cost, as you now realize—spend six nights lyin awake terrified. Now, they’re mostly from the city, so you expect a little culture shock, but I guarantee that if you took every spider, snake, shark, box jellyfish, wasp, sandfly and crocodile out of the equation—just wiped em out at the touch of a button—they’d still lie awake all night.

Well, there’s the heat, of course, said Georgie. And look how bright the moon is. And all the new smells and noises.

They’re shit-scared, if you’ll pardon the language. People are terrified of the wide, brown land.

And you have to reassure them, said Jim.

Mate, these are big beer-swillin blokes. You know, lawyers and surgeons and kick-arse CEOs. I don’t reassure em, I rip the piss out of em.

Jim had to laugh. It must eat into your return business.

Jim, they love it. They’re back every year for more.

Ritual humiliation, said Georgie.

I figure I’m just doin my bit for the nation, you know?

All three of them laughed and Jim’s prickliness subsided minute by minute. The guide had been puzzling over them all day, she felt, and now he’d decided how Jim might be managed. He was no fool.

About nine they called it a night and Georgie and Jim walked up to their insect domes a little way along the ridge. They were separated from the beach by a belt of spinifex. Georgie lay a while wondering if Lu wanted to be found. There was something special about him, not just because she had become obsessed by him and conferred importance upon him by simple investment, but because there was a thing about him she’d been trying to define for herself, and it struck her right there as she zipped herself in and Jim scrunched around on the shells to get comfortable. It had something to do with music. The string in the tree had confirmed it. So many other men were mostly calculation. Jim Buckridge, even Red. The chief impulse of their lives was management. It wasn’t exclusively a male thing but, God knows, men had it in spades. Most of her life she’d had it, too, just living by will, achieving and maintaining control. But Lu was pure, hot feeling. Emotion cut off and backed up. She’d felt it the instant she pulled at his shirt in the hotel room. His startling tears. They’d shocked her briefly; she found it all a bit off-putting. For her it was just an impulse, but she’d started something she hadn’t counted on. He was a man trying to live like a man, by force of will. But it was against his nature.

And in that moment of need or mischief she’d broken into something. You could see the relief in him as he cried, even before they made love. Music wants to be heard. Feeling wants to be felt. He’d always wanted to be found, even if he didn’t know it.

She had found him once. And that was in the dark. She’d just have to find him a second time.

Georgie sat up in a ship’s bunk and slid dazed to the thrumming deck. The bulkheads groaned in the swell. She wore a starched white uniform that was stained and wrinkled and on stockinged feet she stumbled down corridors and up companionways in search of clues as to her purpose here. It was as though she’d woken from an almighty bender that had fried her memory entire. The fob watch bounced so painfully on her that it felt pinned to her very breast. Flakes of paint fell from riveted steel panels. She felt the ship twist and flex on its keel. She came upon a man in a wheelchair whose hospital gown was askew. His cock and balls lay against one flaccid thigh and a line of sutures divided him like a ragged zipper. As the deck tilted he crashed into the bulkhead and fell across another man who seemed to be riding a bedpan in the swell. A surgical trolley spilled bloody implements and wadding and the whole ship seemed to hesitate a moment as though suspended. A solitary groan issued from the silence, a woman’s voice, chillingly familiar, and then the deck slammed up beneath Georgie’s feet and doors burst open left and right to spill men and women like rubble across her path, people mechanized by traction pulleys and naso-gastric tubes, by bone braces and monitors. The voice from behind propelled her. She began to pick her way through the confusion of limbs and apparatus but ended up just scrambling over as though they were one inanimate mass until she came to a companionway on whose lowest step sat her mother.

Vera Jutland had the doll-like rosiness of complexion that only a mortician could supply. There was an uncharacteristic look of concern on her face. In one hand she held a shard of mirror. The fingers of the other hand lay on the wattles of her neck. As Georgie came close she looked up a moment without recognition.

I don’t feel anything, she murmured.

Water began to spill down the companionway and a smell like the mud of mangroves rose from somewhere below.

Georgie sprang up in her swag and blundered against the gauze of the insect dome. The sky was oceanic. She lay back and felt the shells grind softly beneath her.

Orright? murmured Jim in his dome nearby.

Yes, she said.

In the moonlight Jim’s head was cradled in his arms and she knew he hadn’t slept yet. She sensed that he wanted to talk. She fell asleep waiting for him to speak.

Steel guitar. It’s across his knee. He sees his face distorted in its undulating surface as he plays right there on the verandah step with the bottleneck glissing up the fretboard and the slow vibrato shaking the loose muscle of his arm. Such an old, old lick he plays, the first he ever learned, and its physical pattern is as sweet as the sound it makes. Like an old woman’s voice. A shadow falls across his feet. He lifts his head and she’s there, her hair grey, her mouth twisted into a grin.

That dirty music, she says. Someone’ll hear.

Behind her the land is thick with trees. Even the birds stir at the sound of her.

The moon comes to earth in his camp. The midden and the beach and the boabs are pearlescent. His hands, his feet, are lunar. He’s washed in cold light. Transparent.