The Butt (19 page)

‘Excellent shot, old boy!’ Prentice cried in delight. ‘Excellent bloody shot!’

‘Your turn,’ Tom said modestly, and Prentice took up a stance.

If the Galil sang, the handgun roared: a shuddering boom that echoed through the dry river bed. Arms and knees flexing, Prentice rode out the big Browning’s recoil. The mineral-water bottle he had aimed at was obliterated: plastic shreds lay in the Tears of Paradise.

‘Didya see that? Didya? Didya?’ Prentice was cock-a-hoop. He snatched the bush hat from his head and slapped it against his leg. He hoed down on the sandy ground, his boots kicking up little dust devils that the breeze waltzed away.

A whoop sprang unbidden from Tom’s own chapped lips: ‘Woo-hoo! Way to go, Prentice!’

Suddenly, Prentice was serious, the steely automatic aiming at the ground in front of Tom’s boots.

‘Brian,’ he said. ‘Please, Tom, call me Brian.’

‘Uh, OK.’ Tom was inveigled by the informality of their mutual gunfire. ‘Brian it is, then, uh, Brian.’ And he completed the outbreak of peace by taking the pack of fifty Greens from his shirt pocket and handing it to Prentice.

Tom was utterly seduced by firing the Galil: it all came so easily to him. Taking the shells from their cardboard boxes, slotting them into the magazine, fitting the magazine to the breech, lifting the stock to his cheek – these were rousingly instinctual actions, as, with his pulse quickening, Tom manipulated himself towards ballistic consummation. The two men resumed their stances, and soon the evidence of their lust lay smoking on the rumpled rocks – yet they continued to blast away.

Tom shuffled up a rubbly mound and fired into the mid distance, aiming for rocks that flaked and whined. Prentice assaulted the foreground, loosing off shots with total abandon. The automatic’s magazine emptied before the rifle’s and he called out: ‘I say, Tom, whoa!’

Tom ceased fire. His cheekbone burned where the Galil had delivered an uppercut.

‘How about a photo?’ Prentice was giddy with excitement. ‘My lady wife will get a real kick out of seeing me like this.’

Reluctantly, Tom fetched his camera from the car, and, as Prentice did a macho dumb show, he shuffled more images into its memory card, where they interleaved with Prentice at Bimple Hot Springs, Prentice in the cloud forest, Prentice on top of the Giant Sugar Sachet.

Then Tom’s cellphone rang. He hadn’t even realized it was switched on. How, he stupidly wondered, could its battery not have drained away, as they drove for day after day into the interior?

Tom thumbed the button and the puny carillon cut out. Hand shaking, he brought the clam shell to his ear. Nothing – or, rather, a foamy hiss on the sands of a terminal beach. He slid it back into his pocket.

Prentice’s mouth hung open. ‘What the–’ he began, but was cut off as the cellphone began trilling again. Tom took it out, hit the button, listened to the hiss. Then he held the cellphone away from his face, interrogating it with his stare.

‘Must be a glitch of some kind,’ he said to his companion. ‘I mean, there’s no network coverage out here, is there? Look, I’m gonna switch it off.’

Prentice resumed his stance and loosed off a shot at a sandstone pinnacle. It crumbled.

Then the phone rang yet again.

‘What the fuck! What the fuck!’ Bellowing, Tom wrenched it out and dropped it. It lay on the ground at his feet, peeping like a wounded bird. Prentice walked over and, picking up the cellphone, switched it off again.

‘I don’t know what all this means, Tom,’ said, handing over the cell. ‘But I don’t like it. I think we’d better strike camp.’

Tom walked over to the SUV. He was about to open the door when an unfamiliar voice said – distinctly, although not loudly – ‘G’day, mate.’

The owner of the voice was standing a few feet from the car’s fender. He must, Tom realized with adrenalized clarity, have worked his way along one of the gulleys that led down into the wadi. He was a very tall, very muscular Anglo. He held a rifle so as to suggest he had Tom and Prentice covered, even though he wasn’t pointing it directly at them.

There was silence for a few moments. The plume of flies that had trailed behind Tom dallied down to enfold his head in their humming atomic diagram. The Anglo, despite his sudden materialization, his bulk and his weapon, was hardly a threatening figure. He had a round babyish face; his short pants were so short, and the sleeves of his matching skyblue shirt so truncated, that they resembled a baby’s one-piece garment.

The Anglo saluted Prentice: ‘And g’day to you too, mate.’

Flicking the flies from his eyes, Prentice replied, ‘Was that you? On the mobile phone, I mean.’

The big Anglo chuckled. ‘Oh, yairs, that’s right, mate. Gotta transmitter on the rig, see. We sent out a signal every now and then, right.’

‘But why?’ Tom asked.

The man regarded him as if he were very stupid. ‘IEDs, mate, IE-bloody-Ds. Bing-bongs – yer sophisticated mobs, that is – use cellphones to set ’em off, not just guide wires. If we think there’re insurgents on our patch, we give ’em a little surprise, maybe set off their booby-trap a bit early – or at least screw with their timing. We triangulate our signal with a transmitter way over on Mount Parnassus.’ He jerked a sausage finger over his shoulder. ‘Then we get a position fix, come and check things out, maybe do a little’ – he ratcheted the bolt of his rifle – ‘mopping up.’

To confirm that he had checked things out to his satisfaction, the baby-faced man propped his rifle against the car.

Prentice, perversely, objected to no longer being covered. Keeping his hands up by his shoulders, he said, ‘But don’t you want to see our papers? Don’t you want to know what we’re doing here? Where we’re headed?’

‘I couldn’t give a rat’s arse, mate.’ For the first time, the Anglo was aggrieved. ‘I’m not some jumped-up fucking Tuggy copper, now, am I.’

‘W-What,’ Prentice said, havering between bravado and cowardice, ‘what if we were armed? I mean, we are, y’know.’

Getting himself out a cigarette and lighting it, the Anglo threw back his head and chortled. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, pointing behind them, ‘meet the wife.’

Prentice spun round. Tom swivelled, squinting into the sun, which was now dropping down from its zenith. Splitting the low-angled rays, arms like the wings of an avenging angel, was a figure spreadeagled behind a machine gun on top of the bluffs. It rose, and called over: ‘Seems like introductions are in order. I’m Daphne Hufferman, and this is my hubby, Dave.’

It was a woman’s voice, although her body was as big and muscular as her husband’s.

‘Look, you two,’ she continued, ‘I dunno what your plans are, but if you were thinking of stopping at the eighty-mile bore roadhouse, then forget it. Bing-bongs took it out a couple of weeks ago. Unless you’re gonna swag down – which I wouldn’t advise – you’re best off coming back to camp with Dave an’ me.’

While she was speaking, the woman lofted the machine gun on to her shoulder and descended towards them. As she drew nearer, Tom saw that, as well as having the same physique as her husband, she also had the same tight pants and shirt. In her case they were bright pink. The full breasts that pushed up into the open vee, strangely, only enhanced the debatability of her sex.

‘Well.’ She stopped in front of Prentice and sceptically eyed him up and down. ‘Whaddya say, sport?’

Like a nervous, comedic suitor, Prentice quailed beneath her steady gaze. ‘Um . . . If . . . If you, er, folks aren’t cops, then who are you?’ he managed to squeeze out at last.

It was Daphne’s turn to guffaw. ‘Us? Us? We’re pet-food shooters, mate. Bloody pet-food shooters. Now get in yer rig, you blokes. Camp’s a fair haul, and we want to be there before the night’s as black as a bing-bong’s black heart.’

Tom stopped the car by the Huffermans’ pick-up and got out.

Behind the camp a network of dry watercourses scored the land: veins on the palm of a giant hand. In the mid distance, the fingers of this hand twisted into the spurs of a rocky mountain that rose some 5,000 feet above the desert floor. Mount Parnassus. A hot, gritty zephyr came scooting down from its peak, stinging Tom’s sore lips.

‘Not a lot, but we call it home,’ said Dave Hufferman, clambering down from his pick-up. He was altogether relaxed – at home, in fact – but his wife bolted to the back of the demountable and began to take down what appeared to be enormous towelling diapers from a clothesline.

Dave Hufferman got out folding chairs for his guests and lit the barbecue. Next, he went over to the container, unbolted it and pulled the tailgate down. A thick white cloud of condensation rushed out to meet him. He emerged clutching an armful of beer cans. Tom hurried across to help him close the tailgate.

The container was stacked high with the jointed portions of scores of moai. The outsized wings, legs and breasts were laquered with ice, and fitted tightly together, pieces of a bizarre three-dimensional puzzle. The few square feet in front of this rampart of frozen fowl were scattered with the Huffermans’ frosty provisions: boxes of pizzas and TV dinners, tubs of vanilla ice cream and plastic bags full of steaks.

‘I put these in here before we left to check you out,’ Hufferman explained – assuming the question uppermost in his guest’s mind would be why the beer wasn’t frozen solid.

It wasn’t. There had also been a box of babies’ feeding bottles in the container. Could the pet-food shooters have a kid out here? If so, it was a very large infant – the bottles were three or four times the size Tom remembered. He thought of Tommy Junior, but asked: ‘What happens when the container’s full?’

‘Well, mate,’ Dave Hufferman continued as they strolled back to where Prentice was sitting smoking, ‘we slow our work rate down towards the end of the month when the road-train’s due, yeah.’ He tossed a can to Prentice, handed one to Tom, and all three men snapped the ring pulls and took swigs. ‘Trouble is – Oi, mate,’ he barked at Prentice. ‘You’re inside the bloody line!’

‘Line?’ Prentice was bemused.

‘The sixteen-metre line, mate. Shift your arse over there, yeah.’ Hufferman indicated an arc of cigarette butts pressed into the red dirt. ‘I like a smoke-o myself, but the container is classed as a workplace, and rules is rules.’

Prentice shuffled his picnic chair over the invisible line. Hufferman snorted. Then, judging that Tom was interested, led him away from the camp.

After a hundred yards they passed through a screen of eucalyptus. The sight that met Tom’s eyes was extreme: an al fresco abattoir. There were heavy trestle tables with chopping boards on them and a steel rack hung with cleavers and butchers’ knives. A winch dangled from the trunk of a dead tree, bloody feathers caught in its links. There were drifts of feathers trapped in the wiry grass, while bits of bone and shreds of flesh were scattered on the bare earth. The flies were clustered so densely on the large scabs of dried blood that they transformed them into glinting black rugs.

Hufferman said: ‘The missus and I can bring down ten moai a day, load ’em on the ute, get ’em back here, joint ’em and bung ’em in the freezer. But, as I was saying, only prob’ is the truck ain’t so regular nowadays on account of the bing-bongs hitting the convoys. So, we don’t like to fill it right up till we’re sure they’re through, right. It’s piece work, see, and if the container ain’t packed as tight as a fag’s strides we don’t get our full whack.’

But Tom didn’t see this at all – he saw McGowan, the road-train driver, strung up on the winch. An enraged insurgent was sawing away at one of his jerking arms. The beating heat from McGowan’s burning semi-trailers crumpled the evening into Hades.

Tom took another metallic draught of the cold beer and turned to his host. ‘I hate to say it,’ he said, ‘but aren’t you worried by the, uh, insurgents?’

‘Us?’ He was incredulous. ‘We’ve gotta motion-senser system right round the camp, yeah, rigged up to thermite bombs. If the black bastards aren’t burnt to a crisp, Daphne an’ me ’ll take ’em out. We’ve got night goggles, and we’re pros, ferchrissakes. Bloody pros. Daphne’ – Hufferman’s honk muted with tenderness – ‘she’s only the finest bloody shot in the Eastern Province.’

Later, the odd couples ate moa breast under the silvery horns of the risen moon. The beers kept coming. The gum trees whispered in the wind, one that carried with it an oddly appealing, astringent smell. Tom asked Hufferman what this was, and the pet-food shooter said: ‘Engwegge, ’course. Where there’s engwegge, there’s moai, right. There’s bing-bongs too, I’ll grant you that – but not yer real head cases.’

The moa was dark, powerful meat. Tom slumped low in his picnic chair, slurping the gamy juices from his paper plate. After a while he ventured: ‘Are there really enough moai here to, uh, make it worth while? I mean, given the secur . . . the security situation.’

The euphemism sounded ridiculous, a kitten’s miaow in this terrible fastness.

‘It’s not only worth it financially,’ Daphne Hufferman said, ‘it’s worth it morally, right.’

‘Morally?’

The big woman, who had barbecued the meat and served up re-fried beans and thawed-out coleslaw with hardly a word, now grew animated. ‘Down south, in the cities, yeah, a little boy or girl loves their little darlin’ pussy or puppy. Loves it, yeah. I tellya, Tom, that’s what we’re fighting for – that love. That’s what we’re living for – and that’s what we’re shooting the bloody moai for, right.’

‘I – I didn’t mean to offend . . .’

‘None taken, mate, none taken,’ Daphne said, then relapsed back into contemplative, beer-sucking silence.

Prentice had been silent throughout the meal, his scant hair plastered on his brow, his scrawny neck pale and flaky, his thin torso kinked. To Tom, he appeared more than ever to be at once weak – and dangerous. He found himself repeating his companion’s name over and over in his mind: Prentice, Prentice, Prentice . . . Until consonants were ground down, and Tom was thinking: penis, penis, penis . . .

Prentice chose this point to break his silence. ‘Look, er, Dave, you wouldn’t happen to know the score in the Test, would you, old chap?’

Dave Hufferman laughed. ‘Your lot got creamed, mate. All out for two-two-nine in their second innings – it’s done and bloody dusted.’

‘H-How did you know that?’ Prentice was outraged but managed to keep it in check. Tom, jerked out of his reverie, sat up.

‘There’s not a lot we don’t hear about over here,’ Daphne put in. ‘There’s the short-wave radio, and people like to use it.’

‘And the Tontines?’ Tom inquired. ‘What are people saying at the moment? Are they bad?’

Before answering, Dave Hufferman drained his beer, then crumpled the can in his ham fist and chucked it on the growing pile of empties.

‘For blokes with your grades of astande? Well, tricky I’d say.’

It was Tom’s turn to splutter: ‘How did you know that?’

‘Well,’ Hufferman drawled, ‘like Daphne said, in these parts a man’s deeds go before him.’ He looked significantly at Prentice. ‘But that can change, mate – your respective grades, that is. It’s all up for grabs in the Tontines. You signed the rider, yeah?’

‘The rider?’

‘The tontine rider on the car-rental agreement.’

Tom thought back to the rental company in Vance, the bored hillwoman rattling through the paperwork. The tontine policy she’d outlined, the oddity of which had stayed with Tom for a while, only to be supplanted by other oddities along the way.

‘Yeah,’ he conceded. ‘Yeah, I did sign for the policy, the woman said it was in place of personal cover.’

Hufferman laughed again. ‘Oh, yairs, they always say that – and overseas tourists always sign.

It took a while for Tom to absorb this – because he was saturated with beer.

Prentice grasped it first: ‘B-But, if all the money goes to the last policy holder left, then there’s every motive for them to–’

‘Do fer each other,’ Hufferman laughed. ‘Bang-on, mate. You ain’t so dusty.’

He leaned forward and chucked a handful of dry bark on to the still smouldering barbecue. It flared up, licks of flame that illuminated the pet-food shooter’s babyish bulk. Huffer-man went on intoning: a witch doctor over a crucible.

‘ ’Course, guvvie banned tontines for Anglos down south ages ago – caused way too much agg. But over here . . . well, some say the whole point of introducing them was to get the bing-bongs to think, er, constructively – invest for the future. Others – yer bleedin’ hearts – they figure the tontines were a cynical move, a way of finishing off the desert tribes altogether.

‘These mobs believe nothing happens by accident – but there’s plenty of accidents over here. Plenty – specially in the bauxite mines, where a lot of ’em work. Feller gets crushed by a slag heap, truck drives over him – his mob go after the other tontine holders – stands to reason, right. Then their mobs go after his mob, and so-bloody-on. The tontine’s like a virus – goes straight into their brains, drives ’em haywire. They can’t stop. They take out more tontines, do more killing, take out more. Round and bloody round it goes.’

‘And the Tontine Townships? How do they relate to it all?’

Tom couldn’t take his eyes from Daphne Hufferman’s bovine face, as, in answer to his question she uttered these dreadful moos: ‘The Tontines suck the bing-bongs in, yeah. Nothing there to begin with but a road stop and the guvvie sector. Now there’s a whole heap of brokers flogging tontines, and the killings are 24/7, yeah.’

‘Thing is,’ Dave Hufferman said, sounding almost sympathetic, ‘once you’ve gotta tontine yerself, well . . . Like I say, it kinda loops you in, right. Even the best of mates can fall out in those circs’, and a bing-bong hitman’ll cost yer no more that a pack of bloody cigs.’

‘So what can we do?’ Tom hated the drunken, hysterical edge to his voice. ‘Can we cancel our tontine?’

‘Ha-ha, no way, mate. It’s a Catch-22 sitch, see. You can’t travel this way without one – it’s on your laissez-passer. No, your best shot is to head straight for the guvvie sector; you’ll be safe there. Then you’ll have to negotiate for a rabia.’

‘A rabia – what’s that?’

But this was one question too many for the pet-food shooters. Husband and wife both stood and stretched, quite unselfconsciously pulling at the sweat-soaked towelling of their crotches.

‘Reckon that’s enough jawing for one night,’ Dave said. ‘We’ll give you the rest of the gen come dawn. The missus’ll show you blokes where you can sack down. Dunny’s over by the container if you need it, right. Take a torch, though, there can be stingers at night.’

Tom’s head swam. He struggled to rise, his boots rattling the discarded cans. Then there were hands in his pulling him up, gently but firmly. Tom realized it was Prentice.

He led Tom to the latrine, then waited while Tom swayed and gushed. Prentice guided him to the demountable, then into the cubicle where Hufferman had said they could sleep. Narrow steel bunks were bolted to the curving wall; on them, flowery coverlets were stretched tight.

Tom was too drunk to protest that Prentice was helping him to undress, but, as he unbuckled his belt, Tom said: ‘Whassup? You wrong kinduv . . . astande . . .’

The aircon’ in the demountable was blissfully efficient. Lying stretched out in the cot, Tom was almost chilly. This sobered him up. Over the unit’s rhythmic clunking he could hear voices coming from the pet-food shooters’ cubicle. He tried to ignore them. Prentice was already asleep, his smoker’s snore sawing through the bunk above.

Then Daphne Hufferman lowed: ‘You’re a big bad baby boy.’

‘Ma-Ma. Goo-goo,’ her husband rumbled.

‘Mummy’s gonna have to change you before bye-byes,’ Daphen cooed, then came the loud ‘pop-pop-pop’ of the big man’s babygro.

‘Want bottle. Want powder,’ he whined.

‘You’ll get a good old wipe, right, before you have bottle, or powder, or cuddle, young man.’

After that, Tom blocked his ears to the increasingly rambunctious horseplay of the adult baby and his carer.

The familiar flashback took possession of him: the leafy balcony at the Mimosa, the aerial view of Atalaya’s perfect breasts, the moonscape off Lincoln’s scalp – then the final fervent pulls on the terminal cigarette.