How I Became the Mr. Big of People Smuggling (7 page)

‘He was Taliban, Son. Infiltrating son-of-a-bitch.'

I doubted it. And anyway, did that matter?

Trust is a funny thing. Some people say you have to give it out before you get it back. I say it is more like the air we breathe and we need it to stay alive, and sometimes a breeze simply blows it all away and some disease of distrust infects everyone and you have to look out for yourself. Suddenly I didn't know who I could trust. Were they all in on it? Charles? Simms? Cookie? Even Spanner?

I hid in my room and slunk between the canteen at mealtimes and my room or my work. I hardly talked to anyone. I couldn't sleep
properly. I would wake in the middle of the night, not from a dream, not nightmares as such, just all of a sudden I would wake and lie there terrified, suddenly aware of something I couldn't name, like something more that my subconscious knew and was trying to tell me. I tried smoking some of Cookie's crop but that made it worse. I'd smoke myself to a stupor and then wake hours later gripped by fear.

Palmenter came and went as usual and the times he was gone it was a relief, but I knew he could be back anytime. I didn't trust myself. If I talked with Spanner or Cookie I was sure to blab about Palmenter shooting Arif. I thought if I said anything to anyone, Palmenter was sure to find out and then I'd be out in the pit too. I did the only thing I could do. I busied myself in work.

Despite all the things that happened, life on the station was mostly dull routine. Between the imports or musters we had all the stuff of keeping the place going. I had fences to fix, particularly around the waterholes where we pumped water for the stock up to a trough, and fenced the waterhole to keep the stock out. The pumps were solar-powered and frequently broke down, and it was my job to check them, weekly for the closer ones and monthly out along the boundary. I'd have to arrange with Spanner for a van and Palmenter would release only enough fuel for the trip. Cookie made up a supply pack. I enjoyed those trips away, camping out under the stars. Maybe I could have done a runner, nursed the fuel and got as far as the roadhouse, but that was the only road out and my luck would be I'd run into Palmenter on his way in.

Charles taught me to drive the grader and we used it to fix some of the tracks that had been washed away in the wet. That was fun. I didn't mind being with Charles. He was so difficult to understand and because of that I had to concentrate and that meant I wasn't likely to say anything stupid. I suspect he found me equally as difficult, but we talked anyway, a sort of laughing parallel conversation, him saying stuff and me too back at him, most likely nothing to do with what either of us are talking about, but I think he was mostly laughing at me and my attempts to drive that thing. The grader was too big for the job. I could have put it into gear and driven a complete straight line back to Melbourne, flattening everything in the way. Except maybe Uluru. I would have driven up and over Uluru leaving a scrape mark that would be my legacy in this world. My escape would have
been at half a kilometre an hour and would take thirty-five and a half weeks. Don't laugh. I worked it out. It is three thousand kilometres as the crow flies and that is two hundred and fifty days or thirty-five and a half weeks. I imagined Cookie would do the catering. We would all escape. Cookie, Spanner and me. But how do you cover a track like that?

And Palmenter would not need that track to follow us. He seemed to have the ability to appear out of nowhere, to have overheard conversations, to know what you were thinking.

To keep myself busy I did extra things. I repainted some of the dongas. Spanner had Simms repainting the vans so I borrowed some paint and redid my room. Then I did the next, and so on. It was better than thinking about things, although with painting it is easy to start thinking. You have to keep concentrating on the job, all the little details, and make sure you don't start thinking again.

Cookie had his drugs. Spanner his shed and car parts and beer. I became like them and soon I was finding small pleasure in my tasks.

I took over the running of the vegetable garden. I redirected all the pipes from the water tower and made it semi-automatic. There is so much sunlight up there and the soil is fertile, all it needs is water and things grow. Cookie reckoned his herb garden was the best it had ever been and that this was the most potent crop he had ever had. Shame that he was the only one smoking it. Simms or Charles might have had some or maybe he gave some to the girls when they were there. I doubt it. I now understood the joke he had made when I first met him. Community garden. This was no community. This was the hopeless refuge of misfits and unfortunates.

We also had tomatoes, lettuce, pumpkins, eggplant, beans climbing the fences, chilli, capsicum. Lots of stuff. We ate well. Later when I took over, I got some chooks and we had fresh eggs. I planted fruit trees, and the oranges and grapefruit did well. But for now I was hiding in the garden to avoid the others and to not talk about Arif.

Palmenter had given me some admin work that I took to do in the canteen. We quite often got to speak but never of anything other than instructions and answers. A few days after Arif, he told me to do a rubbish run. Out at the pit I scouted around the area, unsure of the exact spot, but there was no sign of Arif's body. He
had been swallowed by the red earth. Gone. Buried by someone or eaten by ants and animals – it did not matter. I am sure Palmenter deliberately sent me out there so I'd see there was no trace of Arif and know exactly how much my body would be seen by others if he chose. Not at all.

Soon after that I was given a room at the side of the back verandah where I did some of the bookkeeping and that was the first time he mentioned I could become more useful to him, that he needed someone to take on more responsibility around the place.

Not on your life, I thought.

‘Okay,' I said.

My new job was simply sorting invoices and delivery dockets and stuff like that, but at least it put me nearer the girls and I could often hear them inside the house. The floor creaking, a door opening or closing, occasional laughter that was as rare and as cool as rain. I did wonder if Margaret was in some way their Palmenter, if she kept a watchful eye on them and that they could only ever partially relax, and only ever if she were away. If they were sitting on the verandah I would sneak a look out at them through my half open door, or walk past pretending I had to get something from a file, but since Lucy I wasn't interested in anything other than to look and maybe catch a bit of their conversation. Their voices were gentle and soft like dew on a harsh landscape. They seemed muted, half person, half automaton. Suppressed I'd say now. Scared. Like me. Sometimes, if I knew both Palmenter and Margaret were away I'd sit in my office trying to summon up the courage to say something directly to them. Hello. Or a smile. But then I'd remember Arif and my heart would race and I'd get back to work.

Slowly my memories faded. Too soon it was another muster and the place was full and busy again and I didn't have time to remember even if I wanted to. Cars and vans came and went, the chopper flew in and out several times a day. At the cattle yards, trucks loaded and shook the earth as they drove out behind Spanner's shed on one of the roads I had graded. Each time I was fearful that it would collapse, fearful that then Palmenter would notice me again. Then Simms and I went out to shoot a bullock and butcher it to bring home steaks for the end-of-muster party and I found myself a wretched mess, shaking and sweating and Simms had to take over from me. The way
the bullock fell, the way it folded under itself and then lay down to rest, eyes open looking out at the big sky, the way the earth stained with blood. I couldn't bear it. I told Simms I was ill and when we got back to the station I hid in my room waiting for the dread to pass.

It was about this time that we built the barbecue. I can't remember who first had the idea or even if we discussed it together, perhaps it was Charles who started it by bringing up some bricks. It was difficult to get anything we wanted into the station quickly or officially but we could get Charles to collect building materials from Melbourne. Each time he trucked the vans up, he would pick up things. On trips over several months he got a few bricks or the odd bag of cement, from different building sites each time, so it was all free. He also had a credit card for fuel and food but because I was checking the accounts I allowed him to spend a bit on timber and shadecloth. I knew Palmenter wouldn't notice. This was how we got our brick barbecue.

It was how the bicycle thing started too. One time Charles turned up with an old bike he had picked up from the streetside where it had been left as part of a council clean-up.

‘Hey Charles, where you get that old bike from? I hope you didn't pay much. Whatever you paid, I think they seen you coming.'

‘No pay nothing. I pick it up from rubbish heap. You want I can get you one?'

‘Nah. Where am I gunna ride round here?'

But Spanner fixed it up and gave it a new coat of bright red paint and soon we all wanted one. Next trip Charles returned with several bikes. Most of them ended up on the gene pool but Spanner salvaged bits and turned out three that he repainted. One bright red, one yellow, and one matt black. These three remained ownerless, the only rule being that if you got a flat tyre or if anything broke you took responsibility to get it fixed. I used one to keep fit, riding a circuit
around the station houses. Each circuit took a bit over three minutes but the fastest ever circuit was ridden, of all people, by Simms, who clocked one minute thirty-five.

But that was much later. I was telling you about the barbecue. It took almost the whole year to cart up enough material, or rather, we kept adding to it over the year, so it took shape slowly. Everything was trucked up by Charles except what we could scrounge from the gene pool, like the big metal cooking plate that Spanner cut from the steel of a grader blade. The plate had a slight curve to it, enough to drain the fat that would spill over the side and onto the fire. If you wanted the fire to flare up a bit you let the fat drip like that, or you could slide a lever to divert it into a tin. Mostly it was Spanner who did the construction but over the year we all did our share, adding little features and ideas. Spanner had it so the plate could tilt either forward or backward, to give you some temperature control and Cookie loved it. Not only did it barbecue meat exceptionally well but he could do stir-fry and flatbreads and all sorts of things on it.

It was magnificent. We built it under the water tower. We brick-paved an area and built a pergola out from under, so the area had shade if you wanted it. We had tables and chairs and a whole long bench on one side, a sink, running water direct from the tank above, and the barbecue. The barbecue area grew in the same way a garden grows, slowly. Or rather, it evolved. Each muster Charles would arrive with the truck and as we unloaded the vans we would eagerly anticipate what he had managed to find for us. One time he arrived with a Metters No. 1 stove, one of those old wood-fired stoves like my grandma had in her kitchen. We built that into the barbecue, with its own chimney. There was a storage area for wood between, and a curved part of wall running behind that, sort of enclosing between the chimneys, with an alcove and shelf where we had a statue.

The statue was life-size, as tall as a real person, and was of a naked woman holding a jug. It was solid cement and arrived, as usual, with Charles.

‘How did you get that?'

‘Oh, I was driving along, and it, how they say? It fell off a truck.'

‘Then how did you lift it onto your truck? And why isn't it damaged? I think if it fell off a truck it would be broken.'

‘Oh, I think it was landing on something. Lifting it on by myself
was very difficult, but I am strong,' he said evasively. Charles was developing the larrikin Aussie sense of humour. He stood a little Van Damme pose and flexed his biceps. Ripples. He was not as thin as Simms but he was no weightlifter and there was no way someone didn't help him to steal it. We were all very proud of this statue and it was given centre place in the barbecue back piece.

The barbecue area only stopped growing when Charles arrived one time with some beanbags. Somehow, we discovered that these fitted perfectly on the tray of Bitsy so we would load up with beer and food and head out to the river flats where the bloodwoods were old and dry, because with the brick barbecue came the need to collect firewood. So we had a great excuse to spend the day out – Simms, Charles, Cookie, Spanner and I. Once Cookie even persuaded Margaret to let the girls come with us.

There was an area of woodlands to the east, beyond the creekbed and past the bluff, flood plains where bloodwood trees grew quickly and died just as quickly each wet season. We drove Bitsy around, smashing over sticks and dead trees, and breaking them into fire-sized pieces by driving back and forth over them. As we drank more beer our enthusiasm for destruction grew and we would knock over a few extra ‘for next time'. We would stack the branches up over the top of Bitsy and tie the lot down with a long rope that went up over and then back to itself underneath the car. Often on the way back the rope would snag on something and we'd have to retie the lot. But efficiency wasn't our aim.

The after-muster parties became centred around the barbecue. There was no way Palmenter did not notice the slow build of that thing. I think it must have been about six months before the main part was done and we could start using it, but we kept adding and adding and it was the second Christmas when the statue came. Palmenter never said a thing. Never. Early on we thought he would ask what we were doing and tell us to tear it down. Later, when it was obvious what it was, he might have said something. Like he liked it. Or well done. Or even that he didn't like it. Nothing.

He was always interfering in work around the place, asking what we were doing or watching from his place where he often stood on the verandah. Although he let stuff arrive on the truck without commenting I was smart enough to know that Charles and the
truck was not a way of escape. I didn't even dare ask Charles to take a message out for me. But it was like the barbecue was invisible. It became a sort of shrine, a special place for us all. This massive brick and metal barbecue with stove and sink and statue was never going anywhere yet it was our symbol of freedom. Of escape.

To a casual observer the station seemed to be running well and that was exactly as Palmenter wanted it. We all knew, to varying degrees, what was going on. Although Simms noticed very little about anything and Cookie rarely knew what day it was, I am sure we were all aware that the station was a front for smuggling people into the country. Charles must have known and approved because at each import he collected and returned the vans to us. Exactly how much of it Palmenter owned or organised directly I didn't know, but he had something to do with everything, of that I was sure. When the boats reached the coast, the chopper, under cover of the muster going on, flew into the station where the people were put up in the dongas for a few days. This got them away from the coast and out of the areas where authorities might be looking for them. Later on we used this same basic system but I improved it quite a bit.

They were divided into groups of three, or four, maybe five for one of the bigger vans, and sent south to either Melbourne or Sydney. Only one van would leave in a day, and we gave them each a different route. We had several routes marked out on maps. When they got to the city, the vans were returned to the station ready for the next import. I suspected Palmenter had eyes and ears all along the way, tracking their progress and reporting any problems, and people in the city ready to take back the vans as they arrived.

Although I was doing the bookwork I had little idea about the import side of things. That was all handled by Palmenter and it was all done in cash, but I did discover that the station was losing money and that Palmenter was feeding just enough cash back in to keep it afloat. At least, that's what I thought was happening. One time, I added up the amount of musters and the number of cattle supposedly shipped out and sold. I joked with Spanner.

‘Must be something in the grass out there, 'cause they sure are fertile cattle.'

Spanner was the only person I could talk to. He was my friend but I didn't want to come right out and say what I suspected. I wanted to see if Spanner would volunteer anything, how much he knew or was prepared to divulge to me.

‘Best if you didn't notice that one, I think,' was what he said.

Earlier on, before Arif, before leaving became so urgent, I was out on a bore run and I noticed the road out along the east boundary was well used. At the time I idly thought it must lead somewhere. Later I calculated that if I drove carefully on my runs I might siphon off some small amounts of fuel, store it in containers some place, and I could leave the station via this back way without Palmenter knowing. So I had followed the road for a way and was surprised when I came back to the cattle yards: this wide road did a big circuit around the property and came right back to where it started. Except for a few very sandy 4WD tracks, the only way onto and off the station was via the homestead so the purpose of this well-formed loop of road was a bit of a mystery.

Sometimes Arif was only a memory and I could spend content afternoons with Spanner looking through his fishing magazines. Life was as near to normal as it could be. But other times we would sit together and I'd leaf through the magazines angered at how old they were, that Spanner could be entertained by something he had seen or read thousands of times. Or, worse, I'd have something I wanted to know or understand and I would struggle with how to broach the subject.

It was like that one day when I had been doing some accounts and suddenly it dawned on me. Close to the time of each muster there was a cash deposit, barely enough to keep the place solvent. There was no other income and the amounts varied considerably. I didn't think cattle prices fluctuated that much and I doubted buyers paid cash. Plus, we were running a muster every month now and there simply couldn't be that many cattle or I'd have seen them while out on the bore runs. The cattle were mustered up, loaded on trucks, driven around the property, then unloaded again.

‘It's all a front, isn't it, to cover the choppers coming and going? The noise and dust and traffic. It hides what he's really doing.'

‘Best if you don't go there,' Spanner said.

Obviously the truck drivers knew what was going on. Probably the whole muster crew did too. Anyone who knew anything about how to run a cattle station would know that you couldn't run a muster every month. Perhaps they all started out like me, innocent, doing odd jobs and legitimate business, slowly being drip-fed more about the real nature of it and by acceptance becoming complicit, or being threatened and being too weak to act, slowly in deeper until too far gone to get out. Perhaps that is how they all got involved.

Must be that everyone was in on it at some level. The cops, too. The cops had come to tell Palmenter about the five who had perished out on the south track and I'd seen them take money and steaks from him. And some of Cookie's dope.

The imports paid thousands of dollars each and there were twenty or thirty each month. This was more than a few dollars earned as a bus stop along a people-smuggling route, it was a big business, a hundred grand or more a month, and we were the central point. Even if Palmenter himself was not the king pin, what happened at Palmenter Station was integral to the whole operation and now that I was doing the accounts I was becoming integral too. I had helped to bury bodies and I had witnessed a murder and I felt the real threat that if I tried to leave I would end in the pit next to Arif. I had to get away. Far away. I couldn't trust any of them, not even Spanner who had been here with Palmenter from the beginning and was warning me, gently, to back off.

It was about then that I decided that I had to leave no matter what. Palmenter was slowly giving me more office work to do and Simms was being sent on more of the bore runs. I realised that eventually I would not be sent on any bore runs so I'd have to act soon. I figured if I drove to the south boundary along the cattle road I'd only have to cross two creeks and some dune country to make one of the old desert tracks. They would be soft sand, but should be possible if I let the tyres down. Once I got to the main road I would drive slowly until a roadhouse where I would pump them up again. If I did it on a bore run I would be in Sydney by the time they noticed I was gone. I siphoned off small amounts of fuel whenever I could. It would have been easy to bleed diesel from the generator tank, or from the dozer or grader, but the vans were petrol so I had
to take a little each time I went out on the bore run. If I drove very carefully I could eke out the ration I was given, siphon off a few litres each time.

I started a collection of two-litre milk containers that were easy to hide each time I did a rubbish run. I hid the full ones under the laundry where no one would ever look. Although Spanner was my friend I didn't tell him. When I left I'd take one of the vans and he'd work it out. I told Cookie, saying I was heading off on a two-week bore run and needed extra food. I probably shouldn't have done that.

I was nearly ready to go when Palmenter came to me.

‘Come for a drive,' he said, ‘I've got something to show you.'

He drove me in one of the vans towards the main road and I wondered what we were going to see. He was so casual and disarming that I didn't suspect a thing until about halfway there.

‘So you wanna leave, Son. Wish you'd told me. We could have talked about this.'

I was stunned. I didn't know what to say. I nearly panicked. If he had discovered my plan or found my secret fuel stash I would be about to join Arif. But of course he knew I wanted to leave. When I first asked he had said, ‘Okay, but work out to the end of the month.' By the end of the month, another muster: ‘Not while the muster is on, Son, don't leave us in the lurch.' There was always a reason to stay a little longer and he either preyed on my sense of responsibility – ‘You did sign on for the year, Son, and we've spent a lot of effort getting you up to speed, to be useful round here.' – or he'd offer some incentive.