When Colts Ran (24 page)

Nothing would come of nothing, said Lear, and asked Cordelia to speak again. When she spoke, it was to regret her inability to heave her heart into her mouth.

For some reason, when Colts woke, a memory or the expression of a memory was what he had. Never had he heaved his heart into his mouth. He knew he loved Janelle, but she was many years his junior and the idea felt tragic and naive. He'd paid a price in being ungenerous to Pamela. She wrote, finally, and told him so: ‘How dare you,' etc. ‘It was all going so nicely,' etc. ‘I don't understand,' etc.

Shimmering off into the square of Colts's fading dream was the emptied frame of
Goats
. He was anxious that Veronica not ask about it. As far as Veronica knew,
Goats
remained in pride of place on his walls in Woodbox Gully.

Veronica described Limestone Hills to Janelle. ‘This man, your friend, was a peerlessly lovely boy. He lived in a place where dryness pulled moisture from the soil and dust exploded in mares' tails on white dirt roads.' She was describing her own painting of course, her favoured colours and textures. Colts clamped his eyes shut, praying she wouldn't name the name,
Goats
.

‘Do you ever go back there?' asked Janelle. ‘To Limestone Hills?'

‘It's in the hands of a sharefarmer,' said Veronica. ‘Paddocks, machinery, the lot. Dunc takes his rent, except for a few fenced acres, the graveyard, under separate title.'

The both of them, for some reason, looked at Colts when Veronica said that.

Outside Colts's childhood window, in that sweep of limestone country belched by drought, trees died in thousands in the 1940s in patterns like old worn carpet. Veronica had stitched them to canvas with rapid jabs of her brush. He'd set his face to the future, whatever it would bring.

FOURTEEN

ON A COOL DESERT MORNING
in the bloom of great age after Buckler had eaten his breakfast of oaten bran, nut mix and chopped dried fruit on a gritty tin plate, swilled tea from an enamelled mug, cleaned his teeth with a shredded twig, and gone for a good healthy bog in the dunes, he cranked the Land Rover, waved his hat from the driver's window and charged off.

It was for his usual circuit of the minerals' map, Geiger counter crackling, radio direction-finder turning as he rotated its small black handle through a hole in the vehicle roof.

At four that afternoon Veronica, a decade younger than he was, a stringy old bird, active physically and mentally sharp, banged off the shot letting Buckler know she was impatient for her canvases to be bundled and the camp ordered for the night – water drawn, wood fetched – these being their afternoon routines on their desert forays, all of which she was mostly capable of continuing on her own except their bargain was otherwise. She made coffee and waited, the quart pot simmering in the ashes. It wasn't the .410 gauge bird gun gifted from her father she used; it was the heavy centre-fire rifle of American make that Buckler employed against bull camels entering the camp. She lugged it between rocks, holding the butt against a buried stone and boomed the signal in the direction he'd gone. The fat, dangerous slug rose Sputnikwards.

No return, the shot brought only intensification of wind, loneliness, sand whispering over wheeltracks. There was no messenger of Buckler's daily schedule – no sign of his dog, that scabby-coated emblem of man trotting into the camp before him.

A wind came up even stronger, cold and bleak as ever they blew in desert winters, lifting the sand like a floating bedsheet, stinging the embers from the fire around Veronica's ankles as she scanned the dark. There was a radio schedule due at nine next morning and nothing to be done till then except wait. Sitting up in her swag, she later told Colts, sleepless, peering at every shape.

On her return east she gave her account and Colts wondered, was the gap in the stars Buckler standing watching, the moan in the wind his crate returning, the voice in the wind the conversation interrupted in a man's life, fractured and never quite smashed, never quite suspended and never quite finished in its demand for an ear lent?

Colts had a recurring dream of Buckler telling him to pull up his socks. It seemed that death and disappearance restored his old power.

It showed in his face, Veronica giving him a long considering stare: ‘It's not over yet for you, is it, poor boy . . .'

The boy as referred to, Colts, had turned fifty-eight that year.

Next day the wind blew even stronger, Veronica said, and a promised plane was heard but not seen. A full sixty hours after the alarm went out, the Cessna from Marble Bar landed and the search party started. The police wanted to know if Buckler had listened to forecasts, as you'd need to be an idiot not to know what was coming in the way of windstorms. Anyone wanting to cover their tracks could not have chosen a better time. The search was extended but Buckler's truck was not found and the man's dog likewise.

Talk about ghosts and their whimsical power of growth and destruction – Buckler's disappearance was more than unsettling. It broke a way of thinking over Colts's brain like a jug of iced water. It shook him out of unmastered routines. Strange to say, he stopped drinking.

At the memorial service at St Stephen's Church, Macquarie Street, six months after the event, Colts's eyes wrenched around expecting the doorhandles to be banged open and the man alive to walk in. Veronica seemed to have the same feeling but not about Buckler. ‘There are some people,' she said, ‘who might try and take advantage of my grief.' Colts had no idea what she meant. Among the scattering of twenty or thirty people, he knew few there. The minister read Psalm 23. A piper played ‘Flowers O' the Forest'. The congregation sang ‘Abide With Me'. A bunch of old soldiers tottered under the load of their George V medals. Lucky there was no pallbearer detail to challenge brittle bones. Yet with no coffin people hardly knew where to look. Then a stocky, balding man of around forty, wearing a yellow-striped seersucker suit and a sporty bow tie, came from the back of the church carrying a small twist of flowers, went forward, bent to one knee at the communion rail, placed his offering next to Veronica's wreath on centre stage and departed up past the pulpit and out the vestry door without turning around. Veronica sighed, almost a hiss but maybe a sigh of relief. ‘Who was that?' said Colts. There was something about the angle of shoulders that gave his memory a tug, a drinker's shadowy recall.

‘Never met him,' said Veronica.

Afterwards Colts felt Veronica's fingers firm on his elbow, steering him away from certain people, and planting him in front of others – not before he'd seen the card on that twist of bushland blooms: ‘Rusty', just the one word inscribed.

Everywhere Colts went the year after Buckler disappeared he saw the cars men left when they made a break in their lives. Trees grew through them or they were tipped on their sides, rolled over, wheel-less, hubs in the air, axles gaunt, burned clean, left bullet-riddled or painted with warnings. These men's existences ended in boarding houses or in paupers' graves without any memorial except for their vehicles not quite abandoned of feeling.

Sylvie let it be known that she met other blokes. She attracted a distinct bunch, younger, who materialised around sunset at the takeaway counter of the Central Café before they wandered up to the Five Alls for a schooner. Colts she referred to as her desperation policy, not directly to him, but to a woman, who told a man, and the man got the dig in while asking Colts if he liked old coats. It hardly disturbed Colts's feelings. She took pity on him sometimes, he allowed that, hooking her finger into his belt and giving it a friendly tug. She hated to be alone.

‘A last-lighter,' Gilbert Dalrymple called Colts, seeing him ambling past Sylvie's fence, hoping for seconds or some such humiliation of the sort slighted men laid upon themselves.

Last-lighters were dumb buggers as defined by Dalrymple – those who squeezed into luck at the final moment of wishfulness, just as Dalrymple did at Mt Stony strip after a day's supering, and the mist came in, and he was lucky to be alive, kissing the dirt.

Acceptance was the times' theme and Colts, a half-generation older than Dalrymple, who had film-star golden locks and various definitions of cool, caught the tail end of it – casting himself as an observer of other men's ruin. Excepting Dalrymple was married, Colts felt a tinge of jealousy around him relating to Janelle.

Dalrymple and Cud were friends. Dalrymple urged Cud to wake up to himself, that he had the best little woman in the world standing by in Janelle if he wanted her. Colts cringed hearing the words. It was from Dalrymple (not through the agency) that Colts learned that Cud had bought Wirra-ding, a district gem: it was a plain brick homestead on a gentle bend of the river with five hundred acres of lucerne flats and hilly country behind. Colts waited to hear what Janelle thought of Cud moving to the town, gracing its horse-talk with his name. Dalrymple seemed to know the answer, but held off supplying it. Anyway it was obvious. Janelle had never looked happier.

Colts's rivals lining up at Sylvie's ramshackle cottage were on a bachelors' honeymoon having glimpsed the solution to the problem that burnt others up – empty desire, nights of frustration, blank incomprehension, the pattern of blokes. Their hair was tied back in ponytails after the after-work shower. Their idea of elegance was the Indian shirt. They wore loose trousers, sandalled feet. They were wispy-bearded, sex-war veterans and used aromatic oils.

They were all a bunch of miserable duds of the male persuasion, in the words of Janelle. ‘You're not like them,' she told Colts. So it was revealed to him through these words that he still had a chance with her. She was pleased that he'd given up the grog, taking it as a personal compliment, and asked him to drop his washing around. She seemed to know he was smitten, still, that her name rode above him like the moon in a cloud, never touching the physical elements except in this way of dealing with each other, through his dirty moleskins in a pile and his shyly affectionate readiness to help where he could. If Colts didn't think about Cud and didn't see him around, and if Janelle didn't mention his name, then Colts was happy.

Damon was now eighteen. Janelle, pretty in her flower-sprigged frock, bangles jangling up her arms – more like a sister than a mother to Damon – said he'd come a long way for a boy who tore the wings from flies, upset teapots and bit her friends' fingers and thumbs. They'd gone on a picnic, to bare acres on Duck Creek; it almost seemed romantic until Damon appeared in neighbouring paddocks toting a .22 and shooting back dangerously in their direction.

‘He needs a tight rein,' said Colts, holding on to his hat.

‘Cud will see to him,' said Janelle, a statement that chilled Colts more than being shot at.

After this Colts took long, apparently aimless, drives through the long summer evenings as if he hadn't already spent more than half his life behind the wheel. The road towards Wirra-ding made him feel as if Janelle was imprisoned there but unwilling to be sprung from its stones. Dalrymple said he'd flown low over, and seen Cud out riding with her.

Colts turned off at Duck Creek, going up into the hills at a right-angled intersection taken on impulse. He felt an unsourceable excitement, a mixture of hope and despair, but where it came from was all around him. A desperation landscape made the heart feel glad concurrently with dragging him down. Hills and gullies were moods and emotions to him, part of his inexpressible being. He told Alan Hooke he was looking for a place where a pool emerged under ferns and trout rose greedy to a fly rod. Hooke himself had such a place in the hills: The Bullock Run. Hooke went there and stood still. It wasn't Colts's style, he did not fish, and the creeks were all puddles of dry, but it was the feeling he was after, of ripples spreading, lapping banks of dragonfly hum and bee-sting. Nothing in Colts's behaviour on his lone drives squared with his long years of quietly plugging along visiting farms for Hooke and buying and selling sheep and dispatching rams to the butcher and promoting new lines. On a whim he started breeding up a small flock, just enough to cover costs and enter a fleece in the local show. Taking an interest-only loan from the Banque Nationale de Paris, who were offering money to all-comers that year, he bought the Duck Creek acres but now wool bottomed and debt loomed.

It was the outward and visible sign of disturbance, stupidity with money. Dalrymple's father, Oliver, had owned the land in the 1960s and lost it through happy-hooligan spending sprees. He'd bought an Auster tail-dragger, presenting it to his son, stereo sets that wouldn't fit in the lounge and an Indian Chief motorbike immaculately ducoed slime green.

‘Lower your landing gear,' said Dalrymple. ‘Get a grip.'

Colts hardly cared what he meant.

Bare distances were revealed to Colts through the wooded gaps of the ranges as an unsealed road went through. They offered glimpses of wide-open space where all things could happen. Dunc Buckler was in Colts's mind every time he steered round a bend and saw an old car chassis. Buckler's Land Rover must have run into a wind-scoured gully and been covered, poor bastard, in one of those soil shifts where half the continent lifted in a roar and dumped itself on another. Buckler never stopped coming back, here was chassis after chassis after chassis of scrap metal looking lively, before Merrington and Sons dragged it away and crushed it in giant calipers.

Up on the eastern rises of the Isabel hills, Colts found the rusting VW used by the cherry orchardist Wolfie Keuper. The Isabel Walls threw their teetering shadow on the pop-top.

The seats were gone, the engine was gone, the window glass crazed milky white. Grass grew through rust holes. The VW had a metal frame jutting from the back with strips of tattered webbing made into a seat. It was a spotlighter's perch and Colts instinctively jumped when he saw it. He'd seen Keuper spread-eagled on the beetling Walls in 1967, an ex-Nazi superman. Neglected cherry trees against a wall of gums stood like a man in camouflage greens with branches on his back. A ghost man of the Isabel persuasion, Wolfie had warned trespassers with shots and the mountain still had that feeling of sights aligned. It was how the migrant was seen patrolling during the four days cherries were in season come December, mad as a meat axe in his adopted homeland, although considered quite sane when revisiting the fatherland, from all accounts.

As Colts mooched along he ate a handful of sour bird-pecked cherries and spat the seeds out the side window. Of course, he remembered himself as a teenager, blocking, strutting, unapproachable in cast-off military tatters and spouting bits of talk memorised from Dunc Buckler rants. When Damon was thirteen or fourteen Colts had found him tormenting a sparrow with a stick, and when he objected the boy skewered the sparrow dead. ‘Happy now?' It went on from there. ‘Kingsley Colts, king shit,' said Damon when Colts had advice for him. Damon's crowing intelligence wiped the teaching staff of Isabel Intermediate High out of the reckoning when it came to useful knowledge. What Damon didn't know he could work out, or learn in ten minutes, hunched over a book while tapping his foot and darting around glances like a trapped foe. Colts heard Cud had put him on a horse and Damon looked for the throttle, a phrase offending to horsemen. Maybe the reason for Janelle getting together with Cud wasn't working, but Colts heard that Janelle was happy.

A band of men peaking with male thirst at the Five Alls claimed the non-drinking Colts as their accomplice as they nursed a nightcap (or three) when the blinds were drawn after ten in the saloon bar, and the coppers up the road turned a blind eye. Colts polished a bar stool or stepped behind the bar as a publican's favour, pulling beers. Just now and then, when Dalrymple came in, he allowed himself an Islay malt and a dash of tankwater – it had to be late.