Gunshot Road (7 page)

Fun for all

I WENT INTO THE
cemetery, nodded at a few individuals. Most of them were too busy staring at the ground to notice.

The atmosphere was…funereal. Grave. A pathetic little affair, shot through with the mourners' despair. Whether for the deceased or for themselves was difficult to tell. Maybe it was the resonant frequency of their collective DTs. Twenty or thirty people, mainly men of course, most of them looking mildly surprised that they weren't the guests of honour. Yet. For a lot of them it couldn't be far off.

Doc's wasn't the only ghost floating over the assembly. The other was Wireless. The bastards hadn't even given him bail, shipping him off to the remand centre in Alice Springs after the most perfunctory of hearings.

We seemed to be waiting for something. I stood at the back of the crowd, let my mind wander. Found myself contemplating the scenic wonders of the Rabble from the rear. Aside from your everyday sweat and diesel stains, there were the acid splashes and gelignite flashes of their trade, starbursts of crushed quartz and red ochre, smatters of ash and axle grease, goat shit and goulash from the roadhouse kitchen.

Staring at the play of light on their patched and baggy clothes was like staring into lino on the toilet floor. Images emerged; among them a wobbly map of Antarctica, a galloping dog and, across Pissy Wilson's broad arse, a Pieta. I was pondering what you'd get for that on eBay—apart from an intervention order—when I noticed that June Redman, the publican's wife from Green Swamp, had put in an appearance. Her charming other two-thirds was nowhere in evidence. From what I'd seen of him Noel Redman would probably be billing Doc's estate for her lost wages. She spotted me, nodded a greeting.

She was wearing heavy sunglasses, but the corners of her mouth suggested strain. Couldn't blame her: I'd be strained if I was married to that.

Father Dal Santo was holding an umbrella over his head in a hopeless attempt to ward off the sun. He was looking particularly shrivelled today. God save us, I thought, even the imports are getting on. He must have been round here for twenty years. I wondered idly if there were more where he came from. Perhaps young Filipinos were beginning to see the dark.

Two cars arrived a little after the others, pulled in behind my own. The first was a rugged white Holden Rodeo, from which two young men emerged.

Probably eighteen, twenty years old, both lean, physically poised, slightly ill-at-ease at finding themselves in this geriatric assembly. They were fitted out in the ubiquitous moleskins and riding boots of their caste. The main distinction between them was that one RM Williams shirt was a slightly darker blue than the other.

The second vehicle was a green Range Rover, the driver a solidly built older man in a suit, of all things. A black suit, the only one in sight. Even the undertakers hadn't gone that far.

He climbed out, stretched his back, walked across to join the boys—obviously his sons. He was clean shaven and dark eyed. Big hands, hairy knuckles; a gait somehow suggestive of a man accustomed to keeping a level head on rough terrain.

The other occupants of the Rover effected a more chaotic exit. A languid woman in a dark blue dress wafted from the passenger seat, opened the back door in a manner that bespoke a need to conserve energy. The reason for that shortly became obvious: two flashes of blue and gold burst forth, tumbled over and picked themselves up. Honey-haired girls of seven or eight, twins.

They darted around the other side of the car and scrambled back in; emerged moments later, vaguely pursued by a longsuffering older girl with a thin, pale face, dark hair and a sombre dress. The twins completed a circumnavigation of the car, stuttered to a halt when they ran into their mother, doubled back and disappeared into the rear door.

The father, anticipating their next move, went round to the driver's side and swept them into his arms as they leapt out. His family fell into an easy formation around him, and they headed in for the service together.

They'd all done this before.

‘Mate, it's a bloody fun for all,' muttered Jack, wryly amused by the performance. As they joined the crowd I got a closer look at the little girls. The nearest craned her neck, grinned and slipped me a wink.

It was the wink that slotted them for me. The photo on Doc's bedside dresser.

I touched Jack's sleeve. ‘Who are they?'

‘Wishy and his clan. Doc's brother. Think her name's Loreena.'

‘Shit. That's Doc's brother?'

‘Younger.'

‘Seems to have suffered the slings and arrows better than his brother.'

He stared at the coffin ruefully. ‘Being sober helps. Used to be a surveyor round here, Wishy; mapped half the tracks out in the Terra Del Fuego.'

‘Can't say I've seen him round.'

‘Been away for years—WA, Top End. Heard he was back here with the Transport and Works mob.'

The funeral kicked off. Father Dal Santo raised his arms, appeared exhausted by the effort. He droned a couple of wafer-thin prayers, asked if anybody had anything to add. He was obviously hoping nobody had; the weather wasn't getting any cooler.

But the brother stepped forward. He cleared his throat, joined his hands. ‘I didn't say much at the church. Mainly because Albie—most of you knew him as Doc, but to me he was always Albie—my brother was never much of a man for churches. Hated em, truth be told. Raging atheist if ever there was one. Sorry mate,' he added for the benefit of the puzzled priest.

I smiled. I could relate to that. And I could understand the family's dilemma: your Bluebush burying options were limited, to say the least. It was the Filipino priest, the lezzie ladies from the Outback Mission or the town tip.

Wishy Ozolins paused, took in the crowd, nodded at the coffin. ‘Albie…Don't know where he's going, can't even say I know everywhere he's been, especially the last few years. But I know where he came from because I was there, tagging along behind.'

He hesitated, wondering whether he was holding his audience. He was sure as hell holding me. There was something about this fellow's voice that drew you in.

‘Some of you—those who knew us from the early days—you know the story; you got the same one. Family come out from Latvia after the war, things in their memories nobody oughta have and moved to the Gunshot Goldfields. Our mother died soon after, the old man went into his shell. From the time I was a little nipper he spent most of his life swingin a pick or settin charges underground. And it was my big brother who stepped into the breach.'

He drew a finger across his chin, scratched idly, like he was trying to rustle up a memory. He ran his eyes across the crowd, seemed to take us in, every last one of us. He was a commanding figure, this brother of Doc's.

‘Like to share a story, if I may. There's this one time, Albie's following a lead—limonite, it was—trying to see how far it went. No reason, nothing to be gained, he just wanted to know. We're in the gully behind Black Patch Hill. Getting nowhere fast, digging into solid rock, so Albie flogs a few sticks of leaking gelignite off old Cranky Baker. Flogs a few too many sticks I presume, because the explosion turned the Patch into Dog Bite Ditch and blew the shithouse there to kingdom come.'

‘That was Doc?' interrupted Tiger, his vampires momentarily forgotten. ‘I remember that! Pickin turds out of our tea for days, we were! Always wondered who…'

Ozolins smiled, shaggy eyebrows arcing.

‘Yeah, we weren't ownin up to that one in a hurry. But that was Albie. He always had a wild mind. Wild? Inspired, curious, full of questions, forever pulling things apart or blowing em up. Even then, he was a man of ideas.'

He screwed his face against the glare, gazed at the coffin.

‘Sure, maybe those ideas got a bit too much for him in the end. Went a little haywire. Maybe he didn't find his Grand Unified Theory…'

‘His GUT!' giggled one of the little girls, and the mother sighed, drew her closer.

‘Maybe nardoo root was never gonna be the crop that'd feed the world. Maybe that—what was it again? Snowman Theory…'

‘Snowball!' piped the girl from her mother's arms.

‘Snowball, Snowman, whatever. Doesn't look like it's gonna revolutionise outback geology. I'm a practical bloke and I don't know about those things. But I do know that he was a brother to me when I needed one, and the world's a poorer place for his passing.'

He paused for a moment, glanced at his family. ‘Tiffany?'

The little girl with the big mouth frowned, then stepped forward and placed an obsidian crystal on his coffin. It sat there, a mess of intersecting lights and dark flash.

‘So long, brother.' The surveyor's face was like stone as he watched the coffin sink into the ground. The rest of the crowd formed a jagged line, shuffled forward. Fistfuls of hot red earth rained down into the hole.

Half an hour later I was rolling down the road, Wishy Ozolins' oration ringing round my brain. He'd painted a portrait of the Doc I remembered: a decent man. Full of enthusiasms and surprises.

Maybe he'd been overwhelmed in the end, but we're all overwhelmed sooner or later. Most of us by things a lot worse than our own zeal.

I felt I owed him something. We all did. If nothing else, we owed him more than the poor excuse for an investigation into his death carried out by my colleagues.

Had Wireless really killed him in some drunken argument about Greek philosophy, or had Doc been getting on somebody else's goat? Who'd rifled through his books and papers? Who'd been up on the cliff top, spying on his shack? And why could I not shake the image of that man-made rock formation from my head?

His head was full of questions. That was what his brother had said. They were the centre and the circumference of his world.

Had he asked one too many?

I'd been like a caged tiger ever since we got back from Green Swamp, rattling round the office, doing the filing, making tea. Reading Cockburn's stupid little post-it notes. Maybe it was time I started asking a few questions myself.

Doc's brother seemed like a good place to start.

A bird on the ground

THE TRANSPORT AND WORKS
depot was on the outskirts of town. The front entrance was neat and green. Urban, urbane, with a number one cut and a battery of sprinklers tossing out loops of water.

The compound out back was a more honest manifestation of your whitefeller approach to the bush: huge and brutal, an armada of yellow earth-moving plant and equipment encased in barbed wire. The air was thick with diesel fumes and testosterone, the yard hummed with the hiss of pumps and guns, the rattle of running motors and men.

When I asked for Wishy Ozolins, a jaunty receptionist directed me through to the Regional Manager's office. There sat Ozolins himself, as out of place in an office as a camel at a cat show. He was an outdoors man if ever I saw one. That was where he'd been the first time I'd seen him: striding across the gravel with the sun on his face and his loved ones around him.

His office window looked out onto the yard, and from the angle of his desk and the grimace on his face as he contemplated the pile of paperwork in front of him, I suspected Ozolins spent a lot of time looking at it as well.

The cadaverous fellow standing alongside him had the rarefied air of someone who'd consecrated his life to the absolute mastery of something very, very small. He was peering down as Ozolins waded through a sea of numbers, nibbled pencil in hand.

‘You still haven't updated and reconciled your accrual and usages over the last quarter,' grumbled the cadaver.

‘Sorry?'

‘The accruals! The usages!' The fellow sniffed through nostrils that must have given him hell on windy mornings. ‘And you haven't applied the tax entry depreciation percentage rates to the assets register.'

‘Was I supposed to?'

‘The Audit Act says you're supposed to. I imagine the auditors will too.'

Ozolins flinched and twisted in his seat.

‘Excuse me,' I said. ‘Mr Ozolins?'

He raised his eyes. ‘Jesus Christ!' he exclaimed, then leapt to his feet, came running at me. Ran right past and threw open the window. ‘Stop right there!'

There must have been twenty men moving about the yard in a variety of occupations—loading trucks, flinging forty-fours, stripping equipment—but such was the level of command in the voice that every one of them—even the driver of a ten-tonne crane truck manoeuvring in the yard—stopped what he was doing.

Maybe not
every
one of them.

‘Thornie!' he growled.

There was a bloke with a face like a dried waterhole in a lean-to near the office; the lean-to was rickety, its occupant ricketier. He appeared to be grappling with a post-modern sculpture—a thing of plastic slats, aluminium tubing and garish green bolts. He pushed on with his task, oblivious to the imposing voice from above; if anything, he seemed to speed up, although on closer inspection it was only the shakes that accelerated—he was still getting nowhere, but getting there faster.

‘Thornie!'

The bloke in the lean-to raised his head reluctantly, flush-faced, like a man trying to hide from a hangover.

‘Wishy?'

‘Told you to put a safety rail around that nest.'

I saw what Ozolins was referring to now. Out in the middle of the compound, on the ground in front of the truck: a plover's nest, the bird itself gazing out with nonchalant eyes. Hell of a place to start a family.

‘Sorry, Wishy.' Thornie waved a jittery hand at whatever he was working on. ‘It's this chair…'

‘That's a chair?' He studied it. ‘What for? An amoeba?'

‘Mardi asked me to put it together…'

Ozolins rolled his eyes.

‘…but it's got me fucked.'

Ozolins jumped out the window. He grabbed a sledgehammer, an armful of star-pickets and a roll of orange netting, marched out and threw a protective barrier around the bird. When he was finished, he flashed a minatory gaze about the yard, waved the truck on. Everybody got back to work.

As he returned to the office he paused, looked down at Thornie and his bizarre construction. Most of the parts were still spread across a canvas tarp; those that were assembled didn't make a lot of sense: a mass of vicious triangles and other odd shapes. More like something you'd torture somebody with than offer them a seat in.

‘Chair, you say?'

‘'s what she said.'

Ozolins picked up an aluminium tube, studied it, grabbed another piece, lined it up with the first, nodded to himself. You could almost see things click inside his head. He pulled Thornie's monstrosity apart and threw it together again with a speed so casual it was almost indecent.

Definitely an outdoors man, I decided, somebody who could think on his feet, come up with practical solutions.

When he finished, he stood with his hands on his hips, examined the chair.

‘Ergonomic,' he explained to Thornie, and tried it out, cautiously at first, then with obvious pleasure. ‘Hmmm. Not bad.' He put his hands behind his head and leaned back. ‘If you like your ankles up your arse and your goolies in the gravel. Bigger model'd do the trick. Warren!'

The pallid fellow next to me stepped forward, poked a crabby nose out the window.

‘Can we afford another one of these?'

‘You don't sign off on those estimates, we'll have to hock the ones we've got.'

Ozolins took a last, reluctant look around the yard, came back in through the window, dolefully contemplated the paper glacier flowing across his desk.

He raised his head and seemed to realise, for the first time, that I was there.

‘Who're you?'

He had a deep, gravelly voice, rough around the edges, but strangely reassuring when it homed in on you. You knew where you stood with a voice like that.

A woman lugging an armful of files and an arse like a wheelie bin poked her head into the room.

‘Front office buzzed her through,' she snapped. ‘If you'd listen to your…'

‘Mardi! How do you get a chair like that out of stores?'

‘Occupational health and safety. If you had a back like mine…'

Ozolins looked as though a dozen rejoinders were competing to be first out of his mouth, but he caught sight of the glaciating gaze and wisely restrained himself.

‘Phew!' He turned back to me. ‘Worried you were one of the auditors. They're due any tick.'

‘Maybe I am.'

‘Don't think so.'

I shook his hand. ‘Emily Tempest.'

He seemed interested. Or at least relieved at the prospect of another distraction from the paperwork. He stared at the ceiling. ‘You'd be one of the Tempests from Moonlight Downs then?'

‘One of the two, yeah.'

‘I know your old man. Saved my bacon once, west of Moonlight.'

‘Oh?'

‘I'm stuck in the mother of all bogs and ready to start hoofin it, when he appears out of nowhere and pulls me out. Him and an old blackfeller.'

‘Remember the old feller's name?'

‘Strewth, it was years ago. Washington, maybe?'

‘Lincoln.'

He snapped his fingers. ‘That's it. Right job, wrong man.'

‘Surprised you didn't say Obama.'

‘Clever bugger, whatever he was called. They're looking for me, knew I was out there. But they couldn't have seen my tracks: they were coming from the opposite direction. Asked the old feller how he knew I was in trouble and he just smiled.'

‘Yeah, that was Lincoln. Had that enigmatic smile down pat.' A shadow passed over the conversation as I thought about the man I'd loved like a favourite uncle.

‘What can I do for you, Emily?'

‘Wanted to talk about your brother.'

He slapped the desk. ‘Knew I'd seen you before! You were at the cemetery.'

‘Wasn't all I was at.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I was at Green Swamp just after he died. With the cops. I'm an ACPO.'

‘That a skin disease?'

‘Aboriginal Community Police.'

He glanced at my uniform.

‘The other half's in the mail. What did they tell you about his death?'

‘Same as they told everybody else, I gather. They got old Wireless locked up…'

‘Stitched up, more like it.'

‘What?'

‘That's probably unfair. Let's just say there were a few…'

‘Excuse me, Mr Ozolins.'

A teenage boy covered in sweat and a set of bedraggled overalls wandered into the room. Stood there chewing his lip and hopping from one foot to the other.

‘Spit it out, Jason.'

‘I'm loading the gear for the Kruger Bore crew, like you told me, but now the Cants Creek foreman reckons he's top priority. Says he's got a hot mix ready to pour. What am I supposed to do first?'

Ozolins went across to the window, made a megaphone of his hands: ‘Oi! Bernie!'

A beefy bloke manhandling forty-fours onto a Hino truck stopped in his tracks. Paused, twisted his head in our direction, smiled like a man not used to smiling.

‘Who's doing the south road?'

‘Christy Wilson.'

‘Let him go first. And when you do the pour, try to get some of it on the road.'

He grabbed a battered hat from the top of a filing cabinet, a bag from under the desk. ‘Place is a madhouse. Time I wasn't here anyway.'

‘But Wishy!' spluttered the bookkeeper. ‘The auditor's due in this afternoon.'

‘Same feller as last time? Weedy little pissant, dyes his mustache?'

‘Possibly.'

‘Fusses about his car?'

‘Can't say I noticed.'

‘Well I did, and I just arranged it so he won't be here until tomorrow.'

‘What?'

‘Roadworks on the southern approach.' A sardonic smile. ‘Fresh pour. Unfortunate, but nothin we can do about it. I'll be in early—we'll sort it out then.' He turned back to me. ‘Now, Emily Tempest. I dunno what you're on about, but I don't like the sound of it. Can I invite you round my place for a feed?'

‘I'd be delighted.'