When Colts Ran (8 page)

Too soon Rusty untangled herself from the sheets, asked him to go, dressed and left the room. Buckler rolled over and shed hot tears into the pillows, a few rough sobs. Not like him at all, the scalding of sinuses, the stuffing up of nostrils.

Dear Rusty
, he called to her in his mind,
you were the soldier's love, chosen to walk through the fire, not my fire as it turns out so astoundingly simplified down to this night, nor my struggle of a lifetime's continuance, my dreams on heaven's dust-scattered floor
.

Buckler sucked air into his pleura, encountering a cracked rib.

Then to Veronica the next day. She was wishbone-thin, sun-browned, the tips of her rough-cut hair turned almost white-gold from the sun. She was back to the independent and characterful stance of their early life together, in the '30s.

She gave an account of her ride with Colts on the BSA and sidecar, Limestone Hills to the Darling River. She told him about the horses – dead – the swagman – dead – the caravan – burned. His mind on fluff she gave as a cause of death, dismay and madness. If a further example was needed, she gave the pungent detail of his BSA's new owner, a rank madwoman herding goats. At Broken Hill she'd found Des Molyneaux, who gave her Rusty Donovan's Adelaide address.

Their meeting was in offices of the legal sort, dark-stained wood and worn carpets, dim leadlight windows – lowered voices, curious restrained glances – the rooms of Bruce, KC. Man and wife were intruders upon each other's self-protection. It would be sentimental to say so, and hurtful, but Buckler wanted the best for her, and saw she might reach it without him – of necessity, if need be.

He was in battledress. She wore a cotton skirt and a high-buttoned blouse in the way she had of cultivating plainness, arguing against beauty but vital, like the female wren. His campaign ribbons and bravery decorations, hard-won, were rendered futile in her gaze.

‘Look at yourself, you big soggy dope. I'm glad your greatest admirer can't see you; pull your guts in, you look like a generalissimo in corsets.'

‘Where is he?'

‘You'll find out soon enough.'

Buckler peered around the door, as if Colts might be lurking. The model for this meeting was married life – their reunions over the years, the arrival of Buckler late at night, the dust of Limestone Hills in every crease of his pants, Faye emerging from her bedroom wrapped in an Onkaparinga blanket, Colts stumbling from the sleep-out in his striped pyjamas. Buckler considered the whim of taking Veronica in his arms and begging forgiveness, or whatever a man did this end of a comedy situation caught with his duds down.

He'd always liked his homecomings. Veronica, the same as Rusty, had liked his goings away, his comings back. But only if they meant to him what they meant to her. Which they couldn't, on account of their gender. It was a goodbye kiss being male, living life to the limit as a bloke. You made a strike against yourself through the power of your truthful contradictions.

Veronica steered him to a room made available to clients and closed the door in the face of Bruce, KC.

‘Why?' came her machine-gunned questions. ‘Why did you stop loving me? Did you ever love me at all? When did this other life start – the secrecy, the betrayal of vows? I've met Mrs Harris – that Rusty.'

‘How did you find her?' he challenged.

‘My God, you want an assessment? As I imagined her. A bunch of American officers paying court and obviously, by the look of you, that's a surprise.'

They sat in Andrew Bruce's meeting room with the fathers of the firm in various photographic poses around the walls a tribute to strong-woolled merino enterprise. The Bruces were the princely owners of Eureka Station. Their sons went to Oxford and never came back, or dawdled a few years, living on dividends garnered between dust storms and turning themselves English. The photographs alternated donkey trains and camel teams hauling wagons of teetering bales to remote railheads. Watching from a rocky outcrop, a naked black man holding a bundle of spears.

Veronica told Buckler that although Molyneaux, formerly an acolyte, had betrayed him, Colts might still believe in him, though barely, as she thought he would soon grow out of him, according to the signs.

Buckler smiled annoyingly, his admiration having the quality of condescension. Her short, bitter account of their travels was as vivid as one of her paintings. He was not meant to feel blessed by her, but somehow he did, bending his thinning hair to her benediction. It was combed tight to his skull with a mixture of Bay Rum, which squeezed out in gold beads of sweat.

‘Without you, Kings does his own feeling about everything. You should have seen him as we went along – a boy, a stung boy. In the mornings he's crouched over the fire with your old greatcoat dragging in the dirt. By nightfall he's thrown it off, making himself useful. Honestly, Dunc, you've come close to ruining him, just by your great example. Now he's got a chance without you.'

‘He still wants to see me?'

‘Of course.'

‘Where is he, then?'

‘On the grounds,' said Veronica, ‘that you were stationed in the area, and one of his cricketing greats is there, Randolph Knox, he's agreed to being sent to the Bruces' pastoral concern, Eureka, to try his hand at jackarooing.'

‘Eureka! When?'

‘Left yesterday. Before I learnt you were here.'

And just as well
, was the unspoken thought to that.

Buckler saw Colts in a jacket and tie, sweltering in that walloping great finishing school, Eureka homestead dining room, being handed a goblet of black wine by Oakeshott over a saddle of saltbush mutton, and having to choke it back.

‘They've been advised he's ready to run, and if he does it's your concern. You'll have to deal with it.'

Buckler smiled and thanked her for the information, and they stood. Downstairs with the lawyer hovering they agreed they'd speak further. But neither honestly thought they would meet the next day or even long after.

*

Buckler set about getting a discharge from hospital and cadging a workable motor. A rendezvous with Jack Slim close to the Territory border was clinched by radio. Buckler went along, foot to the floor, getting away from Adelaide through the last abandoned farms, the sour washaways, the sheeted burrs and purple carpets of Salvation Jane, out past the gibbers and salt-white tracks of his home state and birthplace, sashaying north into the deserts and hotlands of sheep while he made himself right with the rocks, keeping an eye out for a boy who might just lurch from the scrub and flag him down.

FIVE

FROM A ROCKY HILL RANDOLPH KNOX
watched the road leading north and army trucks at intervals kicking up dust. The trucks floated into the sky in mirages, their dusty metalwork breaking into blobs of mercury shine. Engine sounds crossed the air from five miles away, looping and fading. Sometimes they knocked like a tooth being broken.

Randolph waited for the noise of trucks coming closer, belting across the gypsum flats to seek him, though why they would ever do so was a question he didn't ask.

Mornings showed wedge-tailed eagles in thermals, the ends of their wingtips trailing. A telephone wire on leaning poles sang a lonely tune as Randolph waited for Captain Oakeshott to call through after dark – two short rings, one long. Some of the seven nights Randolph was out there per month, reporting on broken fences and dead stock, fouled waterholes and broken windmills, Oakeshott missed calling. There was always the threat he would turn up unannounced at one outstation or another and give a reprimand of the sort that broke kids' spirits. Four years before, when Randolph had started, Oakeshott claimed he'd go loony in the boundary rider's hut and talk to his sheep. The manager didn't know Randolph then, whose reply was if you didn't talk to your sheep you got nowhere. Oakeshott denied it with scorn, but Randolph had only to listen: ‘You're for the knife,' or ‘Into the bucket of guts with you, my friend,' as down culls went, driven in a sad little mob into the dark hole of an old mine shaft one hundred feet deep.

Too hard by a long chalk was Captain Oakeshott; Randolph thought the pit a foul solution, indecent, lazy. But there was knowledge the man had around sheep and their breeding, the calculation involved in keeping them in good wool in dry country on the margin of the world's greatest deserts, and as much of that as could be imbibed Randolph Knox took in and made his own.

In the spare time, he was allowed reading or did leatherwork, making tooled belts and wallets with ram's horns embossed on them, the edges tightly sewn. He wasn't lonely. He liked his own company. Just sometimes he looked at his own shadow and wished it wasn't there.

It interested Randolph how Oakeshott was two people, one known to slaughter an animal in rage when it wouldn't do what he wanted, the other reflecting on watching bare-breasted lubras in Western Australia leaning over sheep and calming them by understanding, following the tip of the blade shears with their noses, and the sheep loving it so much that when they were shorn they didn't run away but seemed to want to come back again for another round of being nuzzled and clipped.

So everyone was two people, while Randolph's struggle was about becoming one person and sticking to that. Fair-haired, light-skinned, blue-eyed and of good strong build, Randolph Knox had one overriding physical fault – that jaw like a bag of marbles. It made him look as if he had a bad case of mumps all the time. His nickname at school was Bumper Bar. Being made Head Boy didn't overcome the humiliation of that.

Sitting on the hut steps with a .44-40 between his knees, Randolph counted out cartridges. It was the rifle that ‘Won the West'. For a week there were ten slugs allowed. Eureka flour and tea likewise came rationed but, oh boy, dingoes needed to come up to Randolph's boots and make their crazy howling before he'd let fly and give Oakeshott the satisfaction of berating the waste of one shot. But that week he blasted at anything in a blowout marking his finish – bottles, tins, rabbits.

Home was a thousand miles east on a sparkling river, the Isabel, across from the Snowies on the other side, where Randolph saw himself returning with the sun at his back, droving a mob of his own, a royal progress up the home valley with cold thunderheads and blue distances. The mob would flow, bumping his horse's legs and funnel into a gate, pouring through into the evening paddocks, dust drifting as his father welcomed him without a word of praise, except he would mark the achievement with a broken blade shear driven into a tree.

Hours passed in such thought, daydreaming and planning before Randolph went inside and made himself ready for the night – into that one room of corrugated iron containing a wire-framed bed, lumpy mattress, blankets from the saddle roll and a smoking lamp by the light of which he read the novels of Sir Walter Scott. He dozed, and woke to see marsupial mice skipping across the pages. By the light of the guttering lamp he saw them enter the leg of his trousers, where they hung on a wall-peg, and reappear, tiny-whiskered friends peering over the belt buckle. Nevertheless, he threw his book at them. Then his attention was strained through to the first faint weakening of darkness when he regretted the night was over. He lived on mutton, dried apricots and roll-your-owns, at the start of a week routinely slaughtering an old wether, leaving the skin drying under stones. Cooked the best chops, salted a leg, fed his dog, scattered the offal and sat chewing till his jaws ached. The skins were his to sell, likewise any dead wool found on carcases thanks to which he was in good credit with a stock agent.

An older brother and uncles were away at the war, but Randolph was exempt by family agreement. Diversions were not in his nature. Those that were he wrestled and smothered down. By the sixth day he decided he'd earned a geek at a fuss though; and late that afternoon after checking miles of fence he rode the gypsum flats to look at the trucks closer. One came along and he was too far away to hail it, so turned around for the ride back. Thought he'd soon be at the hut, only down in the dry gullies dark came on. A horseman in that country was the hand of a crawling clock.

Light flickered in a ragged stand of trees; men were camped there mysterious as plotters in the borderlands of Caledonia. Edging closer Randolph saw the outline of their truck. Around a camp fire figures moved against the flames, tipping their throats back, hard voices grumbling. Obscenities Randolph had never encountered in his life exploded against the dark scrub and towards the commotion his sheepdog, Maisie, dragged herself on her belly as if roused by such words of sexual thrust.

Turning for home a second time, Randolph was baffled and supposed he was moving along a fence line rather than across it; couldn't get his directions fixed as eroded gullies trapped him and stars that were behind appeared in front. He gave up and returned to where cones of firelight hung above trees. Sparks flew as the soldiers added more sticks and Randolph scooped a hip-hole in the dust a way off, lying with his knees hooked to his chin, hand on his dog's muzzle to say
be still
. He felt crusty sleep gathering as the men by the roadside shouted and threatened punches and quietened. Later Randolph heard them lurching around in the dark, tripping over stones, cursing. It was cold. Maisie growled into her throat. Randolph would approach them in the morning hoping for breakfast.

Under a sky of pink, from under a rock like a lizard, Randolph Knox emerged. It was a morning stranger than he could have imagined, crumbly with dirt in the early light as he was, on all fours on gravel. To his wonder he heared the knock of willow, the cry of ‘Owzat!' as crows flew up from the mulga.

Flies buzzed in the early heat. A ball rolled towards him, a scuffed six-stitcher slowing across stones and coming to rest at his toecaps. Pride compelled Randolph to emerge from the mulga dribbling the ball from hand to hand – a serious player who'd rejected a place with the NSW reserves for the sake of something more: to go jackarooing at Eureka, the farthest place due west where merino sheep ran, because the Knoxes of Homegrove raised merinos at the farthest point due east, and pride sat up for notice, spanning the map.

Two figures in khaki shorts, bare-chested, wearing unlaced boots and infantrymen's slouch hats took a moment to register the apparition out of the sun. Boys had jostled for places at the nets to watch Randolph's action and modelled themselves on him, muttering under their breaths as they faced him, ‘Bend the front knee, get the weight forward, get the left elbow up, over the ball.' There'd been something appealing about Randolph as a boy, charming to dogs and strangers, yet so bloody ugly and grave, which Randolph strangled as he went through adolescence as a defence against being discovered in his deepest part. These were men, and he had the same defence against them.

The men ran to their fielding possies and waited half-crouched with their hands on their knees. One of them directed where the others should stand. They were having a go at him no doubt. The batsman squared up in front of a kerosene drum.

‘Send 'er down . . .'

Rough ground slackened Randolph's pace, but not by much. The drum flew with a rattling crash – three batsmen in a row – and the players came forward to look Randolph over, disbelieving the sight: Stetson and skinny stockhorse, red kelpie and peeling nose blisters. They asked no questions, apparently stoking their conceit as he joined their breakfast fire listening to their talk. Bacon curled, eggs spat, baked beans sputtered. Randolph learned they'd been at Tobruk and were bitter fighters resentful at doing a cushy job while their mates took New Guinea and Yanks rooted their sheilas rotten under St Kilda Pier.

‘Did you ever meet a lieutenant called Sandy Knox in the engineers?'

‘An officer?' they spat.

‘Missing in Crete.'

‘Sorry to hear that, mate. No.'

Finally it was time to go. Throwing their kits on the truck they stomped around the camp site, hurling empty beer bottles into the bush and listening to the smash, stamping their boot-heels on empty cans of beef, which they flung discus-like as far as they could send them.

The truck crunched into gear and waddled along the road getting its links oiled. There it waited one hundred yards ahead with the engine knocking, and Randolph got the idea being offered. He turned the mare's head away, as if to indicate he was on the opposite tack from the one they wanted. They raced their motor and that was when Randolph acted, leaning his weight forward and nudging the nag around, cantering into the dust of the roaring truck. It wove and baulked until Randolph glimpsed an opening and galloped past, feet almost brushing the dirt, belly of the old bolter flat while the soldiers jeered.

Hauling up he watched that dusty, reeking, sunbaked mobile torture platform making its way gone. A game played out. Spectators and players heading their separate ways.

Back on the plain more trucks followed. They weren't of interest to Randolph anymore, mere grinding objects going past, growing smaller each time he looked back. Cresting the gypsum hillocks and walking, leading the mare tenderfooted over crystalline ground hotter than focused rays, he heard a higher, thinner whine.

They're comin' back for me
, was the thought Randolph had, knowing he made a silhouette on the skyline.

On the barely visible track pursuing him was a low-slung utility vehicle, cack-coloured with army markings. Randolph leaned on his horse waiting for it to reach him. While still a way off the driver stopped and used binoculars, then came on as if making a decision, having identified Randolph or at least guessed who he wasn't.

The driver climbed out. It was Major Dunc Buckler returned from the grave where Hoppy Harris tried consigning him. Buckler hadn't shown much interest in Randolph the first time they met, except for the health harangue, eyeing off Randolph's boils, telling him what raw vegetables would do. Now Buckler made it seem like a meeting between mates – as if he hadn't crept through the hideous gullies ready to back up and disappear if Randolph turned out to be Oakeshott, branding him a lecher, or Hoppy Harris flexing for a second go.

‘How are you, sonny?' – those bloodshot, intransigent eyes scanned Randolph's forearms, running over the now-puckered scabs.

So tell him what he wanted to know: ‘I'm all cleaned up.'

‘Good.'

‘'Cause I ate my greens,' said Randolph, giving Buckler pause to wonder at being mocked.

‘Excellent.'

Buckler looked around the emptiness. ‘Are you alone?'

‘You could say that.'

They gathered a few sticks and piled them onto a claypan. Randolph squatted on his heels with his hat pulled over his eyes and rolled a smoke while Buckler did the work, lit the fire, got the billy boiling. A plaster remained on the back of his head where the shearing contractor had sliced him.

Buckler went to his tuckerbox and pulled out a tin of biscuits with chunks of candied peel in them, eruptions of crystallised cherries, rusted bubbles into which Randolph bit.

As Randolph kept dipping a fist in the tin Buckler invited him to keep it. ‘You've got a sweet tooth, obviously, relish them.'

Buckler was working his way round to something he wanted. Hadn't come chasing Randolph shredding rubber and distributing largesse for no good reason.

‘Oakeshott says you're the best young bloke he's ever had.'

‘There's been a few,' shrugged Randolph.

Buckler didn't waste any more words then.

‘Now there's another one, your brand-new first-year jackaroo. You'll meet him back at the homestead, he should be there by now, settling in, an old schoolfellow of yours but younger. I'm sorry I won't be there to introduce you, because he's my ward, a bit of a lost soul – Kingsley Colts.'

‘Nobody lasts with Oakeshott.'

‘You have.'

‘I'm almost through and heading home.'

‘Do something for me, Knox. Make friends with Colts. Don't be sour about him, he's a special case. Been brought up with old soldiers and women too much. Snap him out of it, bring him to earth. His father, Colonel Colts, was the original good bloke. Died before Kingsley knew him, I was the one stepped in.'

‘Why not?' Randolph levelled.

‘It's true,' Buckler said. ‘I have my moments. But listen. No-one's as good as the person you make yourself.'

Randolph supposed not. It was a struggle though.

‘He's had a taste of the outdoor life,' continued Buckler, ‘on my soldier settlement block, Limestone Hills. Nothing he liked better than binding sheaves, following the plough, always first in the workshop to grab the wrench when I yelled out fetch one. Rode like a Mexican bandit flying off every second trot, but stuck to the mount he did, hates to surrender. Lately he's been kicking around the country on a motorbike, getting a mouthful of sand. Don't ask me why.'