When Colts Ran (31 page)

Back in the town of his birth Dalrymple had been a boy standing at the window of an electrical store and looking at the blank screen of a television set before he'd ever seen a TV picture or there'd ever been reception in the area. Fragments of streetlights and passing cars had the excitement of a good flick.

Erica opened the door behind him, admitting a shaft of light.

‘Gil, are you in there? I wish you'd answer me. The kids are frightened and they need you. Don't be unavailable when you're needed.'

An edge to that word, used by Erica when Dalrymple took jobs away from home, brooded, took long walks or went to the Five Alls until way after closing time and drove home blind as a bat. Unavailable, a word taken from a book about men and used to hobble him, he argued, whereas unavailable in Dalrymple's vocab meant something else – appetite defined as perfectly strange and perfectly beyond understanding. Unavailable to himself, which didn't mean don't try perfectly grasping.

Why Erica with her beautiful wisdom would need any self-help had raised a tricky question, troublemaking, a bad sign between them.

‘Cosma's in the home paddock,' he said.

‘I'm more worried about the kids just now.'

‘She's your horse, honey-hearts. But there's that steel post, y'know.'

Her silence told him she knew all about the picket. A lesser woman would have rolled her eyes, but Erica had an implacable way, she made a monument to justice and stood there waiting. Somehow she knew the horse was safe while at the same time Dalrymple was already responsible for its death.

He couldn't say it having lied, having made a false promise to lapse his commercials and stop risking her breadwinner – but during a storm he was up there with his great wings flung around. Erica once called him the eagle who'd won her, clawed her from the rock of the Isabel Walls where he'd backfired his Auster and drawn her eyes up: expecting dunno what from his need to soar – abundance? What she loved in him first she blamed him for later. That was the mystery of marriage, and it beat them.

‘You can't just disappear, Gil. It's teatime.'

There was a dull flash, an echo of weak thunder. The storm had moved too far away to be interesting. Dalrymple led the way back to the kitchen.

‘The kids are okay,' he said as they went in. ‘It's you who's frightened. You don't like saying what rattles you, that's the pits. And they pick up on it.'

‘Rattled, scared, you can say that again,' she allowed.

But brave too – with the fatalism of a soldier, he had to acknowledge. He wasn't as brave as her himself because not as fearful. She never missed a parent–teacher night and would visit old people in hospital, those she'd met at her humble jobs, or on the road befriended when their cars broke down, stuck by their steaming radiators with reptile calm. She lent money to people in trouble and gave too much, cutting the household back to neck chops and suchlike, and it seemed to please her, that Dalrymple and the kids risked breaking their teeth on bone fragments.

Erica's father, Silvio, had been a tough old bastard. He took her from school and used her roo shooting as a child at Byrock, where they'd kept a refrigerated trailer. She'd aimed the spot while he took them out – big reds and fully grown greys – a nightly killing for pet food suppliers until the day came when Erica stood up to old Silvio and she rocked from home.

She'd missed so much school and then caught up. They'd sparked, ignited, at Claude's Duck Creek Wetlands Open Day when Claude and Normie Powell raised money for quadriplegic research and Dalrymple offered loop-the-loops.

Erica still shot for the dogs, drawing a bead in the creek paddock at twilight, going forward with the skinning knife. He'd find her kneeling, splashed with blood, hacking through sinews, because old Silvio had started something that might be described as a battle against whatever it was that limited a woman.

Dalrymple knew her secret and it confounded him. Unlike other people who were good at shutting things off, Erica had no way of stopping what started in her head. Silvio had behaved towards her as he might to a son, and that was all right, lots of girls rose to that expectation in the bush and it made them. But Erica made it an attitude about everything when she was older. She just had to do it. For that reason she had rock climbed with the Bonney crowd. She'd lived with Claude attempting to match his pace, and he was not a bad bloke – just wasn't up to her, though he always believed he was better.

‘We cannot, will not, are not seeking another cent from the bank,' she'd said when Dalrymple came to her with the scheme for the interest-only loan that would set them back on their feet. A French bank too, which seemed a cracker of an idea to him – Banque Nationale de Paris. They were the best rates on offer.
Bon chance
. Everyone on the Isabel had been onto them.

A grave woman, in short. There was medication in the pantry and Erica used it, but she liked the fags and vodka greyhounds best, two or three biggies at the end of the day, and sat for hours when the kids were asleep with a sketchbook in her lap. Bloody tense, that meant, at the work of living. Yet Dalrymple loved that grey-eyed tiredness of hers, with the downturned smile and the prominent vein in her forehead that swelled sometimes, and the bare curve of her neck, which he stroked while holding her, calming her, getting her to trust him again and twisting her hair and coiling it to the top of her head.

‘Nice, nice,' she'd murmur.

‘I want the chance to make you happy.'

These words Dalrymple used when he first loved her. She gave him that chance. Then they were living it.

In the kitchen Erica took Polly's braids and made them tight as licorice twists. Polly was seven, then, precursor of wide- foreheaded beauty, holding her feelings glassily open, which meant an element of judgement visible in her mother's favour. Kim had a pale, five-year-old freckled country-boy face, and he and Dalrymple were like two dented, dusty scones, the pair of them. Already they had a conspiracy of blokes going between them.

The kids ate their baked beans on toast with mounds of steamed spinach on the side, sprinkled with grated cheese. They had white moustaches from drinking milk and Dalrymple tousled their hair with one hand on each submissive, grateful head.

‘Don't you know you're safe in the house? It's your castle,' he said.

‘The lightbulb went on and off,' said Polly. ‘It sort of sizzled.'

‘That's normal,' said Dalrymple.

‘She said it was going to blast,' said Kim, looking up defiantly.

‘That would never, ever happen,' said Dalrymple.

They got it from Erica. She was unable to touch a slack powercord unplugged from a wall without wondering if it still had electricity in it. Old Silvio covered every practicality in her education except her mind. They'd only had Coleman lamps out west, the light of camp fires and Lighthouse candles.

Dalrymple said, ‘I saw a fireball once.'

‘Not now,' warned Erica.

‘Hey, but it was quite something. It was down on the Isabel Estuary, on the coast. Came through the lounge window and danced round the kitchen, soft as fairy floss. Everyone laughed, but their hair stood on end and their fingertips glowed purple.'

‘Did it blow up?' said Kim.

‘I just said what it was – harmless.'

After they cleaned their teeth they went to Erica for a story.

Dalrymple stepped to the door and reported a clear sky.

‘The stars are out. Here comes Mr Moon. Hey Kimmy, let's go to the top of the hill and check that horse.'

‘Can I, Mum?'

‘Fine,' sighed Erica, releasing an arm from around her son's waist. He ran to Dalrymple and launched himself at him, and Dalrymple lifted him to his shoulders.

They walked up the hill and the mare came from shadows and followed through the gate.

The boy smelled of damp grass and fresh wind, muddy earth and a whiff of horse from stroking Cosma. The very essence of Dalrymple, he was. No way to see him as a semi-professional League player with a head like a concrete potato, one who slips Dalrymple cash, two or three hunnerd dollar notes at a time, withholding condemnation. Ghosts have power but only in the shape of chronology shredded, never to the letter of outlines fixed.

Later that night Erica told Dalrymple she didn't like him interrupting their story time. Polly was a great little reader and Kim wouldn't get hooked if Dalrymple kept tempting him off.

‘It's important a kid goes free,' said Dalrymple.

‘Whatever that means,' said Erica. She rolled over. ‘Hold me,' she said.

Dalrymple waited until he heard her quiet breathing, then turned his back, looked out the window into the sparkling, rain-washed night. He imagined he was a battle-tank commander. The enemy came from the direction of town. Dalrymple had them bailed up in a gully of rocks. Tracer bullets lit the sky and he picked off small, dark, scurrying figures as they scattered. He did it wing-over and screaming down, the Gatling pouring hot lead like a garden hose.

One day Dalrymple rang home and heard his own voice on the answering machine. Leaving himself a message he knew he'd be first back to savour its curiosity.

That was the day he knew he needed to run. He didn't like who he heard – ‘You're goanna die,' he told himself, so many parts of himself flown, so much held back unfinished.

Dalrymple goes to the rocky hilltop above the house, outlook wide, dusk not far off in the sparkling winter light. He makes a fire of bark and twigs before the time comes and he will have to face retracing his authorised steps to his car. He can see the car parked away and away, winking like a heliograph in the last reflected sunlight, and knows it will be star-dark before he stumbles back. On the main highway fifteen kilometres away cars have their headlights on, so far off that as the minutes pass their lights go piling into each other in a continuous animated pulp of diamonds.

Once before there was something like it, along a pipeline big enough for a monkey's motorbike to ride through, travelling two thousand kilometres into mountain gullies from a gas field under the inland sky.

Dalrymple had known nothing about it until Colts told him. Taking a long back road out of ample curiosity, Colts took a wrong turn and went for miles in the direction of sunset over bare hills.

Almost on dark it was a camp of a sort Dalrymple came to. He had never seen anything like it – boom gates and mesh trackways leading between brightly lit bunkrooms. Climbing from the car that day was like arriving by flying saucer on the planet Earth still wrapped in its strangeness. A million bucks minimum in transportable comforts, there was no other way of describing it to Erica that expressed his decision fully, that there would be bankable cheques if he could get an in. Thus did a man immerse himself in a new dimension of revelation apologised for as money for the family purse.

It was one of those infrastructure projects you didn't read about in the papers anymore. When Dalrymple was a kid they were launched by prime ministers and relayed on national radio while explosives plungers were pushed and the earth shook. Now they were only written up in the financial pages. It was like receiving what he never counted on, but somehow always did, just in the nick of time – call it grace.

Dalrymple ignored Keep Out signs and investigated the facilities. He fell into conversation with a bloke who told him a lot in the short walk they took from car park to poolroom. In a mess hall he ate lasagna and salad after getting a meal ticket from a cook who welcomed him. Then there was Eddie Slim. They greeted each other like long-lost brothers, which was hardly the case: as boys, Slim had smashed Dalrymple's balsawood glider without saying sorry, and Slim's father pawed Dalrymple's mother after making promises laughed at in retrospect, when she was publicly called hysterical.

They settled into the wet canteen, bringing up names. Normie Powell had flown with Dalrymple last year on contract, mapping wetlands across the Top End and doing loops and wing-overs for the hell of it between thunderheads.

‘So he's the great man now,' said Slim. Everyone he'd ever known had played a game of keeping him on the outer.

It was the ideal job and Dalrymple hadn't even known it was coming. On the phone he painted it to Erica as more or less local, home every weekend, but Australasian Gas Reach was the company name and Dalrymple reached indeed, wearing a monogrammed cap under the blue sky, filling a barcoded niche with his photograph laminated on plastic, occupation – Pilot Observer, Line Inspection Group – stamped in red letters. Home again, Erica laughed sideways and said he looked bought up. Only one word was needed to renew their conflict, and that was the one.

After the first time it was a month before he was back home again – Erica talking about the charge it gave his balls, same as if it had been a woman, she said, the corners of her mouth tensing. Sometimes he was poised within sight of the sea, other times found himself with red dust between his teeth on the farthest fling of the pipeline west. His boy and his girl loved the presents he brought them, Barbie dolls and GI Joes from old-time cluttered general stores, last-minute grabbed.

Erica incessantly asked what his feeling was, and if only he could articulate the feeling he could do anything, go anywhere, make free with their lives, she implied. The word summarising it for Dalrymple was waste, but how could he say it? Waste so intrinsically part of him it was beyond expression. She might think he meant his life was wasted with her, but no not that. Waste as defined by a process of nature, the wearing down of hills to the distant sea that he talked about with Eddie Slim as they sat in the purple dusk drinking themselves silly. Dalrymple ached being part of it although hills didn't have feelings, only Dalrymple did.

Of course a female was involved: a battered beauty sitting at the end of a dirt strip. Dalrymple ran his hands over the Maule taildragger's fuselage and wrestled mockingly with the prop as if he were enlivening a living depressive. When he took her up, snarling along ridges in late afternoon light, holding to steep low circles with G-forces dragging his cheeks, he knew he was ready to die. But he didn't or wouldn't die, readiness being a condition of life now for Dalrymple.