How I Became the Mr. Big of People Smuggling (2 page)

‘The Territory is the worst of it. Hard men up there, harder than most places. They don't take easily to strangers, outsiders, people who...' and here he was for a moment lost for words, ‘...people not like themselves.'

I don't think Dad was worried I would turn into a hard man of the outback. He knew me too well. Although I'm quite physical, he knew I didn't have the tough streak it takes to be one of them. After all, he had watched me through all my school years.

Every school has its bullies and ours was Dan Taylor. He and his buddies picked on everyone, not just me in particular, although it often felt like it. Many times I would be hiding in the library reading rather than face him in the courtyard. The funny thing, though, is that Dan would be shocked to know I learned so much from him. Dan, the thick-as-two-short-planks bully! I survived at Palmenter Station because Dan taught me how to become invisible, how to pick up when was the right or wrong time to speak or to ask for things, and how to think quickly and talk my way out of situations. He taught me to notice who was where and doing what, because when Dan was on the oval extorting lunch money I could safely walk from the library to get my own lunch. And later I knew, because of Dan, how to use thugs to get my own way when I wanted to and even how to pretend to be a thug myself.

I told my Dad I was going to take the job. What he had implied was that while I might look the part of the hard-drinking territory men, I wouldn't fit in and I'd be pushed around just as Dan had pushed me around. Funny that, for the very same reason that I did not want to go directly to uni, I now felt challenged, to prove that I could cope to live away among the real men, as if there was some test I had to pass and the only way to pass it was to head directly to it.

‘Think about it for a few days. Maybe we can see if Simon's work comes up with any better vacancies.'

‘Dad, no one is leaving at Simon's work. They just don't get any vacancies. Plus, this is better. Full board, full-time, I save everything instead of coming back to the city fly-in fly-out and spending everything I earn.'

He tried to persuade me to take a few days to consider, but my mind was made up. If I rang them and said I was unsure I would probably lose the offer and I had agreed I could start immediately. I was supposed to collect a company car the next day as I had agreed to drive it to the homestead of a place called Wingate. In return for that I had free use of the car for the next two weeks. This sounded
like the sort of place I would want to work. There was no way I was turning it down.

Next day I got up early and left. I turned off my mobile. I wrote a note to my parents telling them that I'd call them with all the contact details of the station as soon as I got there, because all I knew at that time was it was called Wingate and it was in the far north of the Northern Territory. I wrote for them not to worry, that I would be home in six months when I was due a return air ticket as part of the contract, but I underlined that I'd be working the full year because the bonus for completing the year was an extra three months pay.

The agent had given me an address in Geelong and told me we could sign the paperwork later. That didn't seem at all unusual to me and when at the address – an old warehouse out the back of Geelong – another man gave me the van and a map and instructions how to get to the station and told me all the paperwork would be done when I got to Wingate.

‘No worries mate. Jackaroo, eh? Do it when you get up there, chum. They do all the office shit up there. I just look after the transport for 'em. Take your time, don't push it on those outback roads.'

I didn't know exactly what a jackaroo did but it sounded good. Jackaroo. Like I was going to do a particular job and learn some specific skill. The bloke at the warehouse gave me a choice of the vans and said again I should take my time getting there. He gave me cash to pay for fuel on the trip up and when I asked about receipts he laughed.

‘S'pose so.'

The van was a bit of a comedown from the company car I had expected but as it was set up with camping gear and a small stove I could see it had some advantages. There was no reason not to leave immediately.

I drove out of Victoria via Ballarat and Mildura and could not believe how flat and barren the land was. I had never been this far
from the city before, this far from the hills and forests of southern Victoria and Tasmania where we spent our family holidays. I called home that night and told them that I was okay, that I'd phone when I could. I drove through Port Augusta and on to Alice Springs. I stopped along the way, at Uluru and Kings Canyon and all sorts of other places. In the late afternoons I stopped by the highway and camped, watching the sunset and darkening sky and listening to the racket of corellas and parrots and then the remarkable silence as the stars came out.

A few days after my interview with Palmenter, a truck arrived with several more campervans that we unloaded and drove into Spanner's shed. Spanner's shed was becoming my regular haunt after work. My work was easy general stuff, helping out in the kitchen, some gardening, fixing reticulation to the vegetable and the ‘herb' garden. It was pretty slack and in the afternoons I would go down to visit Spanner. He always had an open beer on his bench and by the end of the day he was quite chatty, asking about my family or about Melbourne or something else in a way that didn't seem intrusive. Often I'd find myself telling him something from school or about Simon and his mining job, but I can't remember Spanner ever telling me anything about himself.

Spanner didn't have dinner in the canteen, and neither did Palmenter, who I rarely saw, so it was only Simms and me, and Jason until he left after the first muster. And then Charles who had arrived with the truck. I liked him but found him difficult to understand. He was not English at all like you'd expect a bloke called Charles to be, he was Indian or something and he spoke exactly in that singsong way we used to send up at school, and he wanted to be called Charles not Charlie. He even had little swings of his head from side to side and he spoke so quickly you couldn't understand a thing he said, or you'd have to think about it after he said it like your brain was catching up with the words that had gone in.

A woman named Margaret had arrived at the same time as Charles but I didn't know this until a few days later when the girls arrived. I was surprised because one morning something felt
different around the place, and Spanner said it was the girls. He said that they always arrived shortly before muster. Later that day I saw them from where I was working in the garden, they were cleaning the empty dongas and later sitting on the verandah of the homestead with the woman called Margaret who reminded me of a protective mother duck. Her glare was every bit as fierce as Palmenter's.

I never talked to Margaret. She was older and lived in the homestead with the girls. She would arrive with Charles or Palmenter a few days before each muster and depart as soon as it was over.

Spanner helped me drag Palmenter's body across to the 4WD and bundle it in the back. He was a heavy bastard. I remember thinking that television cop shows never show how difficult it is to move a body, particularly a big fat one. We finally got him into the back seat by folding him in. He sat there as if alive but snoozing in that head forward uncomfortable way people do in cars.

‘You drive him out to the pit,' Spanner said.

‘I'll need you too.' I didn't want to be out there alone, to do it by myself.

‘I'll bring a van. We'll torch the car.' He looked at the car. It was all white, unnaturally clean, gleaming, with almost black windows. The interior smelled of leather and pine and was cool even though it had been parked in the heat for an hour or so.

‘Shame. Lexus hybrid.' He gave a little laugh. ‘He musta cared for the fuckin' environment.' He said it in a voice that confirmed he didn't care at all for Palmenter.

Spanner walked off without saying any more. He got into one of the vans. I drove off. The whole way, I kept looking back at Palmenter whose body was bouncing around the back seat. His knees were bent up and his arms had fallen behind and his head rested forward so I could not see the gaping hole in his face where the bullet came out. He looked very uncomfortable but alive and I kept expecting him to wake up, to fly up at me and beat me, yelling abuse and smashing his fists into me, or worse, to start talking again. A rise of panic would flood through me and I'd turn back to check. Yes, he was still there, still dead. I couldn't believe he was dead. But I had shot him. Me. And a different panic would hit me. What
would I do now? What would happen if someone found out? Could I trust Spanner not to tell?

I'd force myself to relax. No one would ever know. Spanner hated him as much as I did. I could trust Spanner. He had been here all this time, had been party to all the goings on. He knew about the pit. If ever this came to light he would be in just as much trouble as I was.

Who was I kidding? Spanner hadn't shot anyone and I could hardly claim self-defence. Gunshot wound in the back of the head? There was a big difference between shooting someone in the back of the head at point-blank range, and pushing a load of sand over the bodies of illegals who had perished in the desert. I was in big trouble.

Spanner's van caught up to me and was following closely. I drove on automatic, fluctuating between near panic and total calm. I remember that the car smelled of that pine fragrance. I remember pine, and calm, and panic.

Funny how the mind works, what things it finds to notice when it's trying not to notice something else, like the lurching body of Palmenter that at every bump shifted and wobbled like a monster awakening. That pine fragrance was calming in a familiar way and I tried to remember it, identify it. Perhaps it was something my mother used. I liked it. It would be nice in my room. The drive seemed to take a long time.

At the pit Spanner looked over the car as if considering what parts best to strip off it and keep. We had no plan; we were making it up as we went along, but whatever we were going to do we had to be quick. It was the middle of nowhere but we both knew there were people everywhere, the nearest several kilometres away. That was too close. Mustering crew would be back after lunch. Chopper would arrive tomorrow. It would bring the first of the imports an hour after dawn. That was too soon. Nearest road was twenty kilometres, nearest town three hundred and fifty. That was too close. Too close. We had to hurry.

‘Probably best if we don't take anything.' Spanner pointed to the other side of the dozer where he had recently extended the pit. The new bit was deeper and had steep edges. ‘Park it there. Leave the brake off, outta gear, windows down. We'll push it in, bury it.'

‘I thought you said burn it?'

‘Musterin' crew'll see the smoke. Chopper too. Due anytime. That pilot is a nosey bugger. Not sure about Newman either.'

Newman. What Palmenter had said. Should I tell Spanner? Maybe, but right now we had to get rid of Palmenter and his car.

‘They're not due till tomorrow.'

‘Today. Tomorrow. Who knows? They'll be nearby someplace. They might come out this way anytime. Any one of them could see the smoke, come lookin', see the burnt-out shell. Won't be able to bury it till after it's burned and tomorrow the place will be crawling. We'll bury the whole thing right now. Come on.'

I drove the car to the edge as he directed. I had barely got out and closed the door and he was pushing it, rolling it to the edge. In the movies it is so much easier: they push the car over the edge and it tips easily, plummets off the cliff, and bursts into flames before it hits the bottom. We pushed hard but as the front wheels went over the edge, the sand collapsed and the bottom of the car hit the ground. It was stuck half over with the front wheels midair and its belly resting on the dirt.

Spanner swore. He went to the dozer and started it, rammed into the perched car so that it slid over the edge, bounced a couple of times and rolled onto its side. I tried not to look to see Palmenter. Spanner pushed sand in after it until it was buried, then parked the dozer. It was done quickly, efficiently.

‘Grab some of those bags, some of that shit and stuff, throw it all over, cover the fresh sand so as it doesn't look like something's just been buried here.' He pointed into the main pit that was full of garbage. It was foul smelling and revolting. Most of the bags had split when dumped, or been torn open by wild dogs and dingoes. ‘C'mon, do it.'

While I was tossing bags of garbage over the newly scraped sand he broke off the branch of a shrub and dragged it around where the dozer and 4WD tracks were, obliterating them, or at least confusing them so they looked like long-ago tracks. A few months, after the wet, and there'd be no trace of a body in a near-new Lexus 4WD under sand in the middle of scrub that stretched unchanged from here to the Gulf.

Nothing had changed at the homestead. Spanner broke off a couple more branches and showed me how to sweep the sand to hide our drag marks, the footprints and blood. Not that the blood showed, you'd have to know what you were looking for. Unless you knew, the area looked like dirt. But I kept seeing stuff. Patches that might have been blood. Or flesh. Bits of skull and brain. Already the ants had invaded. There were lines of them on the sand and up the two steps onto the landing, across the boards. I wheeled out the firehose and washed the boards down.

We had just finished when the muster crew came in. Two old utes roared up in a cloud of dust and stopped right at the canteen door. Bodies tumbled out of the tray and cab and into the canteen. I was thinking you'd have to do more than fire a gun and spray blood and brains over the ground for them to notice, and as the dust settled on the wet boards I was thinking that that was the end of Palmenter, that was the end of it all. Good riddance.

‘Better go about as if nothin's happened,' said Spanner. He was reading my mind. We would come to rely on each other more and more, and this understanding we had of what the other was thinking was later to save my life. But that was in the future and I was wondering what I should do next. Could I leave? I wanted to get as far away as quickly as I could. Maybe we shouldn't have buried the car, I could have taken it, abandoned it in Katherine. Or even gone as far as Alice or Darwin before it was missed. I could have dumped it somewhere in the city. Cities are much better places than the wide open spaces to hide things. Perhaps I could take one of the vans.

‘For Christ's sake don't do a runner,' Spanner said. ‘Play it cool for a week or so. If anyone comes lookin' for him, notices him missing, be suss if you've scarpered.'

Spanner wasn't the mind-lazy slob that most people thought. You know, a lot of the people you meet outback are smart. They just look and talk rough and drink like they're thirsty but underneath they are real decent and thoughtful and have a pretty good idea what is going on. I looked over to the canteen and wondered about the muster crew inside. I'd wait a week.

Early on in my first year, every week had been my final week, but now it really was. That was it. Palmenter had always had a good reason for me to stay a week longer. ‘Just see out this week and then
you can go,' he'd say. He could be friendly, like it would be a favour to him, and as I was owed all my backpay it felt impossible to say no. Or he'd promise a bonus, a swag extra if I saw out whatever it was that was urgent in the coming week. Always something. Later he was less friendly. Plus, he controlled the vans and the comings and goings. It had been impossible to leave without his blessing but now I had no reason not to go. I'd lie low and wait the week out.

‘You hungry?' asked Spanner.

Food was the last thing on my mind. I shook my head.

‘Good. We gotta bring all the vans up. I got six ready. Park 'em up here, ready, like it was meant to be. Got to fuel 'em up, have 'em ready.'

‘Before the mustering crew's gone?'

‘Have to. Be suss, not having Palmenter strutting around during the import, but if we look and act like it was planned all along we might get away with it.' He signalled towards the canteen. ‘They'll never notice anyhow. They've finished muster now, canteen'll be wet, they'll be pissed in no time. If we don't get the vans up now, first chopper'll be in the morning while we're still doing it. Tonight we'll have to be doing the licences and transfers, draw up maps for them. In the morning, driving lessons and then we send 'em different ways so's they don't end up in a convoy.'

He seemed pleased with that for some reason.

‘Like in the old days,' he said. ‘We used to bring in a few, sell the van to 'em. Tell 'em to drive to Sydney, or Melbourne. Not so many then. Five or six at a time, just one chopper load, maybe two. Once or twice a year. Not this many, not like now. Gave 'em a chance. At least they had a chance.'

I looked at him. I wanted to thank him for his help, for standing by me, because, after all, I was the one in trouble and if he hadn't helped there was no way I would have got away with it. But I didn't. I could say I thought carefully about it and that there was a reason I didn't say thank you. But really, you just don't say thank you to a bloke.

Like I say, it takes a while to get to know these outback blokes and Spanner was one of the best. Maybe he was on the run from the grey side of the law, but that didn't make him a ratbag. Plenty of law-abiding ratbags around the place. As we fuelled up and loaded the
kit and then shifted the vans from the shed to the car park I had time to think about Spanner and how not only was he a great mechanic but he was also a thinker. Once, I had suggested he write down his thoughts. He had laughed.

‘I told you, I don't do paperwork.'

It was one of those long slow afternoons when the sunshine seems golden and the whole world is so at peace that the hours go on for longer. The air was sweet with the smell of spinifex in flower. We were at the gene pool, the collection of things piled behind Spanner's shed. It was mostly cars and vans and parts of them, but there was also furniture, bits of wood, old kitchen equipment, anything that Spanner deemed too useful to throw out but that he had no current use for. Everything else went to the pit.

Anyway, on this afternoon we were trying to unbolt some bench seats to put in the back of the 4WD work unit, Bitsy. While most of the vans outwardly looked to be what they were, a Toyota HiAce or a Mazda or a Ford, Bitsy was a bolted-together amalgam of all sorts. She had no bonnet and a roof from something too long so that it projected out behind and shaded the boot area. The boot lid was welded open with two metal bars that helped brace the roof, and wooden planks formed a platform extending back from the boot so it could carry a load. It looked a lot better than it sounds as I describe it to you, and it ran well. When we drove to the waterhole we would all pile on the back with beanbags and beers and today Spanner had decided it needed proper seats.

Spanner would often get me to help him salvage stuff from the gene pool. I discovered that all of the roadworthy vans were called Betsy and in Spanner's mind this was because by now, after years of transplant surgery, they were all of the same genetic makeup. The original Betsy was a Toyota Commuter bus at the centre of the heap; virtually nothing on it was transferable to the smaller campervans. When I pointed this out to him he laughed.

‘It spreads out through all of them while they are waiting.' He waved his arms at the pile, mimicking the DNA flowing from the centre to the edge like he was smoothing out sand in the creekbed. Or mixing colour into paint.

‘She's the grand old dame. Plus, don't bet on it. I can make any bit fit onto anything. Lots of her making trips to and from Melbourne each month. Ain't that so, honey?' He looked up at the central wreck as if addressing a matriarch.

‘But why call all of them Betsy? Children have different names to their parents.'

‘It's just easier that way. Plus, they are not children. They are...?'

‘Clones?'

‘No, not that. Donors. It's transplants. She lives on in them all.'

‘Like Frankenstein?'

‘Hey, don't be rude. They can hear you, might go into a sulk, refuse to go for no other reason than they don't like you. They have feelings you know.'

He was underneath and I was on the top, holding the bolthead as he tried to turn it. We had to speak between efforts and between his cajoling.

‘Come on ya bastard.'

‘So you call them all Betsy.'

‘Sometimes this is how I feel. That we're all on some rubbish heap. Parked out here, someplace, waiting for the chance to be useful.'

I thought about that. I had only come out here for the year then intended to go back to Melbourne. Would that make me more useful? Certainly, stuck out on a marginal station helping to unbolt a seat from a van on top of a rubbish pile was not too useful. But what was useful?