When Colts Ran (7 page)

FOUR

BEFORE FIRST LIGHT ON BUCKLER'S
last day at Eureka, a rooster crowed from the pen where Abe kept his boiling fowl. There was an explosion of feathers, a screech, the sound of an axe then silence. Buckler half woke from a dream of stumbling over someone in the dark. Himself, he found, when he shone a torch on the face. In the dream he wrestled himself trying to get life back, whether with success he was unable to remember. But a sense of life stirred away below, sending out small white shoots, something like pea sprouts; they crunched under his boots, staining the heavy figure under him, leaving dangling webs of contrition.

Buckler awoke more properly with a grunt and looked around, cursing his luck if Harris came at him in his sleep. Wrote up his diary at first light including confounded dreams, just as he had with a stub of pencil under fire at Gallipoli on the famed 25th.

Buckler stepped outside for his wake-up piss behind the far end of the verandah, eyes screwed tight against the rising sun. Harris stepped up to him without warning, awareness of that moment was for later consideration – en route to Adelaide of all possible kismet-starred destinations.

The leaden finality of a blow. Buckler's pinpoint of consciousness knew only a darkening, a glimpsed hairy hand, a teeth-clicking jolt up the universe of skull.

Jack Slim detected imagined engines for an hour before they stirred the air from the direction of Oodnadatta. He looked at his boss with a lumpy gash on his head matted with blood and busy with crawling flies. Buckler was conscious after being out for the count and thought it a great fuss being made. The DH Dove bore down like a chunky blowfly, its fuselage pitted by gravel and the tips of its propeller blades flashing silver. Buckler was tied to a stretcher with troops attending, but all the same didn't like opening his eyes – could hardly do so – and spoke orders from the slurred corner of his mouth, of which nobody took notice.

They saw Harris's buckboard belting out along the flat. ‘Gone for another year,' said Oakeshott, glad to have the shearing done before the mischief unfolded – Oakeshott not blaming Harris so much as rather putting it squarely on his friend Buckler's preposterous morality.

Buckler was threaded up and fitted into the body of the plane like a khaki grub. The pilot kept the engines turning while a nursing sister gave Buckler a veterinarian's dose of hypodermic solution. In a knapsack held crosswise over his chest he carried shaving necessities and personal papers, his letters, and a hastily scrawled note from Slim wishing him luck.

*

Thermals rose in the heat, the plane tossed about. When the air smoothed engine vibrations ached the roots of his teeth. It was amazing what the heart provided – amorous wants persisting after such a lesson. Where would they go after their hotel dinner? Upstairs to a room previously engaged? Back to her establishment? Down in the dirt of a public park, as had previously been imperative, like a pair of clean-lusting dogs? What would she be wearing? What perfume on her skin like animal sweat, bursting to flame under his touch? He trusted ardour never to look beyond the hour. There must be a reason for that: it meant so much.

They flew, Buckler calculated, over a place of charred sardine cans and bottle tops in ashes where he and Birdy Pringle had yarned, smoked and boiled the billy with a few meagre twigs back when Christ was a boy in short pants, when they had carried brushwood in bundles on pack camels. It was plausible the old-time tracks remained as fresh as when they first plotted the surface, deserts having such power of reminder. Those tracks would still be there in a thousand years. Anyone searching for mortal remains would know where to go.

The ego wouldn't shut up and would go on just as long. Each time Buckler memorialised himself it felt definitive. Original Anzac fighter. Protector of men back home. Thirties' lighthouse keeper against internationalist malice – all those warnings he issued evaporating in history's rush. Surveyor. Tanksinker. Road plantologist. Guardian of two and three. Parliamentary would-be. Soldier author. Husband and lover. Restive lover. Drunk.

It made him smile, which hurt.

None of the high points lasted. Just a feeling of survival as preparation. There he was in the Dove at six thousand feet, his racked shame gesturing to the nurse and being refused rum.

The pain returned from twisting about, the shot wearing off, and, my God, Harris had shown him – all that peering and skirt-lifting and notable excitement for a man of good age coming to an angry point of expression. He'd ceased knowing himself. But it couldn't be bettered either. Far to the east silver reflections in the blazing sky showed one salt lake after another, and in his mind he named them. Then he slept.

Upon waking he confused where he was with being hard-biffed with distinctive effect another time. Prior to his boyhood commission he'd been promoted and demoted a few times in France, locked in a small barred cell formerly used by Froggy farmers for storage of agricultural lime and guarded by a sadistic Tommy. It steeled a man for humiliations in life if it didn't break the spirit first. Birdy appeared one time and whaled into the surprised monitor with the lumpy hands of a farm boy. A good one was Birdy Pringle for taking specific redemptive action in a line of wrong. A matter of two men eye to eye, nothing wider, slogging it out. Though the ruckus that followed was an army blue in which Monash, no less, played the role of arbiter.

The hospital was near the beach. Hairline fracture of a man's skull was the diagnosis – severe concussion – he'd seen soldiers laughing and fighting with worse to carry on with, but didn't want Rusty to see him cut low. So he waited a few days before sending a note. Months of living on the track had engraved lines on his face that weren't there before. Dust spilled from his collars, sprayed from his socks.

An orderly informed him: ‘Miss Donovan to see you downstairs.' It was not Rusty who came on the day but her kid sister.

At the hospital desk they said she'd gone to the corner deli.

Wavelets lapped on the sand, the sun broiled in the west. An explosion of pulse-rate threatened to choke Buckler, squaring his forage cap and dress khakis and taking controlled breaths to calm himself. Before he reached the corner shop with its flyscreen door and rickety verandah posts he saw the kid, Bernadette. She stepped from the shadows sucking a lollipop and propelled him to the intersection and a waiting tram. Buckler looked behind to see if a fellow officer caught him leaving on foot rather than in a staff car with divisional chevrons fluttering, as he'd apparently boasted by a manner of irritated authority brought down from the north.

He took a seat opposite the girl. They stared at each other, deciding what was up. The tram jerked into motion and began floating along. The conductor demanded tickets and Buckler paid. What a coach. What a come-down. It was how tinpot Napoleons arrived in their capitals covered in doubtful glory, escorted by urchins to the beds of their faithless Josephines. Or look at snub-nosed Bernadette and say it was how the righteous young discovered life, cheesed-off at their elders for reasons so obvious they could barely be given a name, except in this case – perfidious Buckler.

‘Something eatin' you?' she said.

‘Maybe.'

It wasn't so different from before, he told himself – buying time from nervous anticipation by sparring with a child. Those spells at the Hill when Bernadette brought love notes or carried them back innocently enough, as long as he gave her two shillings, a go-between skipping in scuffed sandals bearing Rusty's teasing put-offs and her mixed signals of sentimental wording decorated in purple ink. A few days when Bernadette had been content to knock around with him for the simple fun of it, when they'd played checkers and cribbage until they reached the time of day apportioned to a woman's unerring power. When curtains fluttered in the evening breeze and Rusty leaned with her perfect elbows on the sill, showing her flushed cheeks of excitement.

‘You never told us about her, how beautiful Mrs Buckler was,' said Bernadette. ‘We had the impression from the way you talked she was nothing much. Maybe an invalid or something like that, you big wart, but she's peachy.'

Buckler in foolish despair waited a long time before answering, ‘Don't tell me she's here.'

‘I won't if you don't want me to.'

The Adelaide streets were a furnace in the late afternoon. Off the tram and into the boulevards of protestant churches and wholesale merchants, they jumped like a large bug and a small bug into a fiery pan. Buckler felt sick at the thought of Veronica thereabouts and mistook every wafty woman of a certain artistic style as her lurking. They navigated stunned pavements towards Hindley Street until they came to a shaded, freshly swabbed pavement overhung by verandahs three-storeys high. Buckler gave the place an admiring glance: bluestone blocks, iron lace white-painted, brass nameplate shining (Licensee, Mrs H. Harris in gold lettering on a wooden plaque above the lintel), an establishment of undoubted good name.

He climbed solid steps and shouldered open engraved glass doors. Polished floorboards and oriental rugs, hallstands gleaming bright and the scent of fresh-cut roses enticing the traveller into a grottoed shade. He became aware of Rusty rather transformed, the perfect hostess watching through a hatch window.

‘Dunc!' Her voice always seemed shy to him, provisional, with a smoker's burr. Its subtleties landing electrically on his tongue in the gleaming darkness with his eyes adjusting from the outside glare.

‘Quite the establishment,' he said.

‘Not all mine, heavens.' She laughed low, emerging into the room.

Hair up in a French roll, wearing a white silk blouse, a severe black skirt, high heels. First of his new impressions: the coolness of a counter-supervisor, white hand on shapely hip, green eyes upon him so resolutely truthful. They kissed, and there was a givingness in her manner, as if she were able, even now, to yield what she had without mucking about.

Not a good sign, though, because ill-suited to the circumstances. And yet roughly carpentered to his hopes.

Bernadette sat on a nearby chair and watched them. Rusty handed her a set of keys.

‘Can you cope, sweetheart?'

Bernadette left the room.

‘I wonder how he knew?' said Buckler, while Rusty examined his walloped scalp. ‘In a situation, they say, a bloke's the last to know.'

‘I'm so ashamed, Dunc, for getting you into trouble.'

‘Then why start something?' he stoically maintained.

‘I like the circus of a man going away, coming back,' she shrugged. ‘I can be myself when he isn't there.'

So was Buckler the bloke still, who would do his lurking wherever?

‘Your wife came with a lawyer, she held his arm while he looked around. I hated you for allowing it, for our not finishing when I said.'

Buckler couldn't remember Rusty asking anything so stark. She had merely cooled by mail. But he liked her implying he'd made it hard for her, as it gave him more reason to like himself.

As for Veronica, she was a storm beyond the windows, except that Rusty kept using the name, letting her in.

‘The worst was meeting her – it can't go on now it's happened, Dunc dear, and we've met eye to eye.'

‘That's only an excuse in a game one,' said Buckler, not exactly generously.

‘You see, I liked her, so why wouldn't you?'

A woman handing a man's wife back to him.

‘I liked your Hoppy too,' said Buckler. ‘I don't think he minded me for who I am in myself, either. Just for where I came sandwiched in his life. So where does that leave us?'

Rusty played with an unlit Lucky Strike, and he wondered where she'd scored it.

Buckler loosened his tie and Rusty brought him a whisky. For herself, a hock and lemon.

They sat for a while in facing chairs in the cool, afternoon-deserted parlour.

‘To what was.' They raised their glasses. ‘Don't look so hangdog, Dunc.'

So quickly they'd schemed love in. He'd not needed a change of clothes whenever he returned to the Hill. A suit left was aired of naphthalene, a bottle of beer was on ice, corned meat sandwiches and hot mustard. Such earnest, devoted touches piercing him through. She had caddied for him at golf, running the scraper over the oiled sand greens to receive his putt and each step made over the blighted links was towards their lovemaking later. And a gift – a small parcel – of ruby cufflinks, jewels grubbed from dry hills up Dingo way where he'd found her and sis. Holding them to the light, seeing her fingers tremble as she tried them against her wrists. Then he'd know the night he was in for. Why that unprecedented feeling. Why that poignant premonition that culminated, he now realised, at this time, in this place over in the rough where Harris's drive had lofted him.

‘Arriving with a lawyer was a nice touch.'

‘He warned me off, lowering his eyes like a bull. I'm tired of it, Dunc,' said Rusty.

Not much later they went to her room because life, when on fire, ran back over itself sometimes.

*

Rusty kicked off her shoes, unpeeled her stockings, unhooked her skirt and shed a white petticoat, shaking out her great Irish hair, cool as the ghost of their too few encounters and free and as prodigally young as they kissed. ‘This is goodbye,' she murmured.

Buckler thought as he loved her:
You worked and you drove and you hammered through fate, you swam to the stars, but if the patterns weren't yours, if the blessings of meaning bypassed you, then what were you to yourself, where was there left to go? Just the strike at beauty as you fell to earth – which had formerly saved you in rainbow patterns of oily mud and versions of sword dancing, against all odds.

‘I'm not safe.' Rusty pushed against him, held him.

Head hanging over the bed, Buckler saw a spider swinging between the uprights weaving a small web in the dust.
Brother
, he thought, the blood rushing to his brow.