When Colts Ran (30 page)

‘What was it like?' Hooke said as he drove her back to the station.

‘It was all right. Plenty of hours but a bit boring. You try and sit without moving for days on end. He asked me to come again the weekend after next.'

‘Will you?'

‘I have to, don't I, if I want the trip?'

‘I'm matching your earnings dollar for dollar,' said Hooke.

‘I know that, Dad. He asked lots of questions about you – how you got your land cheap, how Grandpa did. He thinks you're smarter than most.'

‘Does he indeed. Then that's all right, then.'

But Hooke was over Merrington pretty much.

It was Liz who collected Abbey after the next weekend of sittings – Abbey collapsed in tears, hunched in the passenger seat almost as soon as they drove from the Merrington front yard. What she told Liz shocked her, but Abbey, shrieking, made her promise not to tell anyone. Liz said she would have to tell Alan.

‘No, not Dad. I handled it all right, didn't I? I told him to stop, and he stopped it.'

‘You were brilliant in the circumstances.'

‘Dad'll only do something about it. He'll say something. He'll tell people. He'll go to the police. Oh, my God. He'll make a mess.'

She sat huddled against the car window.

‘That's what really has to happen,' said Liz.

‘He said it was our secret and “don't tell Al”.'

Liz felt sick.

She waited until Abbey had left on the train and then she went home and told Hooke. ‘Abbey wants to handle this herself,' she said when she'd done. She doubted if Hooke heard her.

*

Later that night Hooke sat on the verandah waiting for dogs to come slinking around his sheep. It was when they came, full moon, the shadows of poplars shortening and the hare in the moon sitting up, ears twitching amid the craters and seas of white.

Hooke's anger poured through his thoughts unstoppably. It didn't feel like his own emotion, strangely, but like something drawn down from a poisonous sac Merrington knew better than he did. How could he have been such a fool as to miss what was going on? All those occasions when Merrington needled him and it was hatred, parasitic, harmful.

He didn't think of himself though, but of Abbey and Tina. He remembered all those times following their bikes through the sparkling mornings, keeping them safe until school. The feeling had never left him.

It was mostly newcomers' dogs Hooke caught, their owners never believing their animals had it in them – claiming their dogs weren't sheep killers, believing they'd never hurt anyone. They kept those arguments to the end, when confronted. Dogs loved sheep with a madman's fetish. They bailed them frightened in corners and savaged them helpless. Only the ram stood ground with a line of courage when Hooke strode to the rescue, nights when he came upon Hollywood Boy III hurling dogs from his bloodied shoulders and meeting their return rush like a hardwood plank tufted with fibre.

Intoxicated with discovery, the dogs returned to their owners' knees and bestowed aroused gazes. He could guess the welcome: ‘What have you been up to, rascal?'

Pretty soon Hooke would make a phone call. ‘I'm sorry, but it can't happen again.'

‘Can't? Who are you to say that?'

‘I'm Hooke the stock agent.'

If he saw the owners in town he eyed them over. No longer did Hooke seem the genial and pleasant bloke they'd heard about. They went around to see where the damage was done, down near the farm boundary fence where a laneway ran between poor weatherboard houses with roofs of rusting tin. Across the end was well-strained ringlock with strands of barb on top and below. There was a sign painted on a steel drum filled with concrete: Loose Dogs Will Be Shot. They hadn't seen it before, or if they had, thought it was just graffiti.

On nights when wind sucked and rain blew they listened as sounds were carried. Was that a distant wild yelping, was it their imaginations, was it the thud of a shotgun blast muted by storm? It made the hairs on the back of the neck stand up.

It was a misty dawn a few days later when stock trucks arrived at a side fence of Merrington's Burnside, well away from the grand house. Boltcutters were used. A fence swiftly parted, wire rolled back and trucks backed in. Merrington woke late hearing confused bellows and went up the hill to find his herd returned to him. Placed under the verandah eaves away from the drizzle was the painting of his mother, the madam, so full of the outrageousness of life and unfairness of life captured by an unknown hand.

One afternoon as shadows deepened Hooke drove to the Bullock Run. Time had passed but there wasn't a moment when his anger abated. Just the appeal of Abbey stayed his reaction. She wanted to follow it through and couldn't say what she would do or how she would do it or when – and so they let the matter stay between them, always waiting. It had been like this for quite a while now, as Hooke bent to the rule of women but assessed suitable planks that would do for a man. He stashed them in various places ready for a change of policy and always carried an iron bar in the car in case he met Merrington on a lonely road somewhere, just the two of them, no witnesses, and he couldn't help himself, God help him.

Cresting the last ridge, Hooke just made the overlook in time to see his sleek beasts like ghosts standing in the rye and sharing the pasture with kangaroos. Big greys too, major eaters, but he didn't shoot them. If he had a painter's skill, he thought, he would take a lifetime to get them down – the way they spread alarmed across the far slope hopping like fleas, or else the one standing fast, the big buck chest-growling, head cocked sideways, protecting his females with troubled integrity.

What else could Hooke do up there except sculpt the gullies with hoe and backpack spray against burr and thistle, keeping them clean for abundance? Sometimes he waited on a high ridge with a Winchester .44-40 cradled, ready for a file of marauding pigs to appear, and when they came, busy tuskers rambling and snouting on short legs, turning the pasture over with the wastefulness of fools, he sent them spinning with well-placed rounds of snap and rapid. Apart from fencing and drenching, there was nothing much else to do and then it was time to get back to his sheep.

Cattle were easier than sheep by far. But sheep were more the measure of a man in the world Hooke loved. He must talk about this to Colts. It was a wisdom Hooke puzzled over as he drove back to town listening to the sound of his tyres spitting gravel: how a wreck and a failure might be the distillation of meaning waiting to be learned.

SEVENTEEN

AFTER THE 1990S CAME THAT
whirling run of zeroes, with age unbidden the theme of men who'd leapfrogged decades barely remembered in a stretch of work and forgetfulness watered by booze.

Dalrymple stopped the car at a familiar road junction and made a call he didn't like making. It was to an official with an office on the Isabel where a dam was proposed, augmenting the capital's water, nobody knew when, or even how as the Isabel was a weedy drain most seasons. The good years were gone. Dalrymple, once intrinsically of those parts, requested, almost cravenly begged permission to park his car at a padlocked gate and walk to a deserted location.

‘We don't normally allow access.'

But this was Dalrymple, mate, Gil Dalrymple. He didn't have germs on his shoes. Around about spread paddocks once owned by his father. There was an Oliver Dalrymple Lane in a subdivision. ‘The Flying Saucer Road, river to the stars, those of us that lived here celebrate the sky.'

A considered blank at the other end of the line. ‘Don't know you, fella.'

Dalrymple chanced a last passport of sorts.

‘I'm a mate of Colts's,' and a trace of suspicion slipped from the man's voice.

‘Phone me again on the way out.'

‘Shall do.'

‘And say g'day to Kings. How is he, the old fart?'

‘Battling.'

Dalrymple palmed the phone into the glove box and nosed north along the dusty farm road. It used to be lots busier as he came barrelling down, averting head-ons on the blind crests with his kids yelling in the back, belting each other around the ear-lugs with their schoolbags. Now Dalrymple crept along in memory, tracking the cold, alienated landscape in a battered Honda Civic, a scroll of dust flattening behind, limp grey hair, formerly golden, tousled in the wind, blue-washed eyes narrowed.

It had taken him a few years to make the return to the Isabel, promised himself since he couldn't remember when. No planning involved, just a hung left from the highway as he followed the tilted signpost on a whim: Duck Creek 13 km. All other times across the severed years he'd gone straight on, making whistling-bys with a no thanks, another time'll do. Such a bunch of crooks and misfits spraying thistles, herding sheep into broken-wired yards, his mates, confidants and customers calling for fairy dust, it made Dalrymple grin.

Having seen Colts go down, Dalrymple's chances hadn't been good. All those saloon bar discussions canvassing world politics, livestock, rugby, flying, women and ghosts. Now Colts was a ghost of his former self – a ghost of a ghost – being nursed in Sandstone Cottage by Randolph Knox of decent persuasion. Word was that Randolph rationed Colts whisky and Colts painted the cottage as thanks, teetering up a ladder and wavering along a plank half shickered at seventy-five.

Arriving at the highest ridgeline the Duck Creek road ribboned ahead, empty and familiar. Life was a matter of avoiding then meeting fates as a product of avoidance. In an Isabel Junction cottage Dalrymple's ex-wife, Erica, was making a new life for herself. A sixty-year-old man in a gaudy bow tie was courting her. His name: Fred Donovan.

Claude Bonney had put a biologist's slant on it, trying to make Dalrymple feel better, saying it was a phenomenon of human sex display that second-string boyfriends from decades past came back into women's lives offering new beginnings and statistically women went for them.

‘She'd never mentioned him. He's an architect?'

‘Back in the Hen House days he was a failed student railway worker pinching stuff and filling his head with big ideas. She hardly noticed him, to be honest.'

Bonney was the one who'd won her first, but not for long before Dalrymple made his bid and after a whirlwind romance they married. As Bonney's next-door neighbours, out on the Duck, Dalrymple flew while Erica remained the zoological illustrator doing the best, most exquisite work in the country, but only at approximately the rate of one or two finished plates per year, the proofs of which she passed over the boundary fence of their adjoining properties for Claude's wondering and exasperated appreciation.

Very strange, hummed Dalrymple, this place of lives lived now gone. A man was given for the sake of convenience a name, while littered behind him were occupations, identities, marriages, mistakes. It seemed like a summary of existence to slither the gravel, a moment of shedding skins should anyone ask for a definition. Was it the man himself or the life he lived doing the moulting? A hunch that was encouraging said the life, while those inclined to find fault blamed the man.

Dalrymple best knew the drainage system of the Isabel from the air. At a thousand feet, trimmed level after dumping super, tracking past Duck Creek heading for Mt Stony, he'd habitually glanced down on the house he owned, gaunt paddocks and a carpet of pines along the creek, the old meat-house like a matchbox where carcases hung in winter, cased in fat for a week, colder than any fridge.

The frost hollows shaded purple always told Dalrymple there were eighteen minutes left to set down on the Mt Stony strip, and God help him if a ground mist came in.

Dunno why, that thought always made him smile. Now he'd never fly again. Too risky-disky.

Large hands on the steering wheel, quick glance in the rearview mirror – an inner voice playing mental radio, bits of old songs nasally hummed, conversations with a blowfly Dalrymple couldn't get out of the car.

‘You are my sunshine, my only sunshine' –
thwack!

The vehicle swerved on the dry grass verges. Leaning from the window Dalrymple followed energetic gyrations of paired lorikeets braiding and sweeping a fence line, making cries of metallic music as they flipped and went.

‘Come back, return, I'm yours, goodbye.'

Every phrase so plaintively familiar. But where did that voice come from, apparently dictating one's existence? Was it Dalrymple's own, or shared?

The ghost of himself, it was, he reflected, as he re-engaged gear and drove on. Talking to that fellow back there certainly had the feeling. Jamboree of ghost men on the Isabel.

Dalrymple glanced at his knuckles on the steering wheel.
Very solid my friend, you are
, he told himself. The contours of bare hills and broken clay cuttings and their absence of obvious beauty were part of him. Ditto yellowed grass the pelt of a lion. Mentally he reached for morning mists and mugs of tea awaiting the sun's melt-off. There behind the hangar he stood emptying his bladder into the shaggily frosted gullies.

A man's best moments came when he stumbled upon himself accidentally complete. If life had a purpose, was that what it was?

Maybe that's why a crash, a charred dab in a golden paddock, had seemed the best awaiting Dalrymple, an enlarged full stop. Then there would have been no way to say he was somewhere he wasn't, someone he wasn't.

The crash came, but it wasn't the flying sort. Erica handled the non-flying sort better because it wasn't a tease of imagination or dirty fuel or metal fatigue, but a manageable life event – whereas Dalrymple thought: better the Bureau of Air Safety investigation, widow in the anteroom, than a lawyer's office, the marriage counsellor or the certified shrink's itchy couch, or (in the case of Kingsley Colts) the Napoleon couch in the corner of a sunny sitting room, a plaid blanket over the knees, in a centrally heated, convict-era cottage watching five-day Test matches on satellite TV.

Dalrymple was ageing by the calendar's reckoning and felt it in his bones – although not too much yet, just a painful knee, a sore shoulder, a stiff neck creaking and catching when he turned his head too far. Ticker in the danger zone, however, and Dalrymple didn't think about that, nor of his hands trembling when he lifted a coffee cup to supercharge waking. Single malt was always Dalrymple's comfort, the pure refined version of heartland for someone homesick for unreachable places. Randolph Knox blamed Dalrymple for getting Colts back on the stuff, but to be honest, Dalrymple had riposted, Colts wasn't choosy round spirits.

Clouds raced over, blue and hectic. It was dry, always dry out the plateau road, but cloudy with a buffeting wind. So many crosswind landings wrestled and won, they said Dalrymple could land backwards on a skewed tailwheel if he chose.

Now scuds of vapour formed over low hills, granite boulders, thistly paddocks and dead trees. There was a whole twenty-four months once when rain was condensed mist droplets. Sandhills blocked the road and Duck Creek got fully six inches, arid zone figures.

That was the year Dalrymple stared at the sky from the end of a crowbar building fences and Erica went to work cleaning the toilet block in the Isabel Junction caravan park. It was when Janelle Pattison went for him with a knife on behalf of the sisterhood, a key moment in Dalrymple's marriage tale, just as it was for Janelle, but the other way around, for it was when she joined lives with Cud and they'd since been solid.

‘Here we go, buddy-boy.'

Dalrymple parked, walked a few paces, clambered over a padlocked gate and thump landed on the other side in a bare, bare paddock. He'd seen a bloke send his thigh bone into his pelvis doing that. The Duck Creek home track, re-routed years ago, no longer entered the old way to reveal the sweep of the landholding – a matter of pride when Dalrymple and Erica bought from the front gate. That was on the 17th of October, 1981, after spring rain – well known as the mugs' date for rural real estate on the Isabel, according to Colts's information, singularly wry – poplars smelling of honey, clover frothing and rye grass imprinting rivers of wind, lambs almost grown out, their mothers matronly. It wouldn't have mattered, as Duck Creek was a piece of land as close as Dalrymple could come to buying back what his father had wasted. Then he, the son, was the wastrel.

Now Dalrymple sneaked in like a thief, alarming staggy wethers. There were new owners under the hills, the larger runs subdivided except for Cud and Janelle Pattison-Langley's Wirra-ding, and Claude and Jacquie Bonney's Duck Creek Wetlands, their boundaries lapping up to what was called the environmental exclusion zone of the projected dam.

Dalrymple shaded his eyes and realised there was more than a kilometre to walk before he even joined with the old track. For this way in he could not see the shearing shed under the old bark-peeling viminalis and the various improved paddocks once revealed from an elevated angle as workable and worth the price; those dreams that were no longer on show, for which Dalrymple and Erica had busted a gut to pay, grading a strip on the ridge above the house and building a hangar with the words Dalrymple Aviation painted on galvo ribs.

The homestead itself never showed itself until the last moment. So Dalrymple didn't expect it yet. What puzzled him was a plantation of pines wedged across the middle distance and showing a stiff green wall of treetops at the top of a rise he walked along. Could not remember for a minute which paddock he was in – a neighbour's?

Dalrymple's navigational sense was better in the air than in walking shoes. The track upon which he trudged sliced east between granite tors casting sheets of speckled exfoliation. In crevices safe from stock a leaseholder had jammed rolls of barbed wire now rusted. They were taken from a demolished fence that Dalrymple had built with his own hands. Which way had it run? He could no longer tell. All boundaries were melted.

And the pines, those pines – he came back to them – who'd planted them?

Of course, now that he thought himself into spatial order and mentally joined the new track to the old,
he
had – last seen in driving rain with thousands of feathery-topped seedlings unloaded from a tractor-trailer. He turned into an alleyway of trees where the trunks were solid and dirty-horned rams got up on beds of brown needles under a radiata canopy sheltered from wind.

Things were quiet at the Duck Creek crossing where cars and dogs and shrieking children once splashed through. There came Dalrymple throwing a long shadow. So quiet at the crossing these days that a wombat had set up residence, burrowing under a chunk of reinforced concrete loosened in a flood. How that water had torrented! Milk chocolate churned to foam, sky laid down as a river, flattened, wetted the grass for miles around the year Polly was born.

The pump shed Dalrymple built that year still stood, ditto old tin sheets lying in a ditch, which he'd always meant to move. It was a shabbier, more condensed, grittier and more disposable place than he remembered, for it was leached of dreams and therefore with the feeling of mere wasteland stumbled upon.

And yet there was the house, with the question storming as Dalrymple stumbled up to a bedroom window with a flap of torn insect screen scratching in the wind. Who was this being standing so intently still as to feel himself disappear? A man back on the other side, making a choice the way a ghost did, whether to haunt, or to toss all that and come out alive.

Dalrymple had loved entering the gauzed front bedroom and closing the door against houselights, standing with his nose to the window netting and watching freeze-frames of lightning in the dark.

‘Gil?' her voice called him.

A thunderclap pretended he didn't hear. He was a youngish man in that phase of his unfolding, in which he was spared knowing himself. The rolling plateau of granite rocks and windblown tussocks gave a sense of being alone on the planet. He liked that, and never wondered why, or what it would lead to.

Out of the darkness came the rumble of hoofs. A strike of white fire and Erica's mare skidded, lit up where Dalrymple had started scooping a tank before his dozer threw its tracks. In the next loud crack Cosma came at the gallop between trunks of glistening snow gums – seemingly motionless, tail erect, loudly snorting. It meant there was a gate left open or a gate knocked open in the squall. No point in rushing out, nothing to be done, but Dalrymple hoped the mare wouldn't spike herself on a Telecom star picket he'd meant to remove. Should have the day before, or really the week before when the cable layers finished and Dalrymple took them beers, a carton of Tooheys hefted high on a generous shoulder.