Cloudstreet

VI. Down Among Them, Killing

IN the barely dimpled surface of country, the wheat is its own map, neat and dogmatic in its boundaries. You can see the sun in it, the prodigal rain, the magic tons of superphosphate. From ground level, the wheat is the whole world, but in the air, or beyond air and sky, the wheatbelt is just that, a strap of land surrounded by the rest of the world. Beneath the clouds of crows it’s hard to find a feature, unless you see a gravel pit now and then, like this one here, with its stubborn island of stonefed trees which cast puddles of shadows about them like shoals. Where the man is still sleeping. Now you make out his vehicle, an old hoodless ute, already rippling with heat, and his dog which snaps at flies and rests its head on its paws. There’s dog hair on the old army blankets, some dried blood, and a smattering of roo ticks. The bends in the air beside him mean there is still some heat in the smokeless remains of the fire. Across the treefork a Lee-Enfield is slung, its scarred butt looking like old pub furniture. Now in the shadow you can see an arm, and a rough chin, a boy’s chin really. If you were me, you’d want to climb in under that blanket and spoon up by him, to take what time you could to smell him and hear his breath.

In the end it’s the flies that wake him. They cluster on the feed sacks in the back of the ute, sucking at the dark honey of thickened blood. The traffic sound of them gets him rolling on his side.

Gday, Bill, he says to the dog.

The dog stands and then sits back morosely. Bill is the saddest dog ever to find water, but he’s companionable in his glumness. The young man leans across to a blackened pot and hauls out a meat twined bone. He throws it to the dog who gazes from it to his master as if truly insulted.

What, you sick of roo?

The dog closes its eyes.

Well, give it back then, I’m hungry.

Bill gets up and retires beneath the shade of the ute. The young man throws back the blankets, gets up and fills a jam tin from the waterbag in the tree. He sets the tin on the fire and surrounds it with white tree limbs snapped across his knee. In his duffel bag he finds an old linty piece of damper and hunkers down by the fire, resisting the need to pee. His skin is raw with sunburn. He has the square, aged hands of his family, and his legs are so long that in a squat his knees have to be peeped over or looked between. With a pocket knife he scrapes dirt from beneath his fingernails. His unlaced boots rest beneath him like luggage.

Who’s gunna do the dishes after brekky, dog? he says as he spins the knife on the back of a skillet. The blade turns, flashing sunlight, and finishes pointing at his boot. Well, the knife never lies, he says with a laugh. I shoulda flamin known that.

This morning he’ll pull a few gilgies out of some farmer’s dam and boil them up for lunch, he’ll sight the gun in with the vice on the back of the ute, and he’ll have to start priming his own shells again. If he can find some shade in the afternoon he’ll drag out a penny dreadful western and read till he’s asleep. The dog will sit beside him in mournful attendance. Barely a thing will move all day in the wheat except the insects and the odd rambling snake.

Quick loaded up the ute when the sun was low on the land. With the mutt beside him on the seat, he drove to the rocky pool and parked in beside the smooth monolith furthest from the water. He laid his ammo along the roof of the cab, stood the rifle against the window and sat back with a smoke to wait. He fiddled with the cable that connected the spotlight to the battery. The dog sat inside, looking at him through the rear window. Quick was learning not to think much at these times, only to listen. Already he could hear them out in the wheat. The sky became the colour of billy tea as the sun disappeared. The motor ticked with cooling. Quick was glad tonight was Friday — he needed a bath something terrible.

When he heard them close he saw old Bill tense up and he got up and rested his elbows on the roof. He slipped a mag into the three-oh and worked a shell into the breech. He let them come on in to the sandy clearing, to the spot where the slopes fuzzed with grass close to the water. The pool was only the size of a double bed. With the faint sky behind them, the roos were easy to see. He counted six, a couple of big bucks among them. He held off, knowing that unless he’d been doing his job better than he thought, there’d be plenty more to come yet.

The pool was shoulder-to-shoulder with them when he switched on the spot. They went rigid and opened their eyes to him. Quick worked from left to right without haste. Shoot, load, aim, shoot. The roos stood there, unwillingly, but unable to tear themselves away. Their necks curved richly, their ears stood twitching. Haunches ticked with muscle and nerve. The sound of the Lee-Enfield was honest and uncomplicated, always leaving enough space in the air for the sound of the bolt clicking in a new shell, as the roos fell, snouts flicking up like backhanded drunks. When finally the survivors began to stagger away, Quick took fast shots, moving the spot with his elbow, until he was taking them down in their stride. And then his sighting eye gave out into a watery blur so that he had to rest. Around the pool the fallen animals lay like a new stone formation, the colour of granite. Some heaved with breath or blood. Even with the whine of sound shock in his ears, Quick could hear the scratching of paws in the sand. He loaded up again, left the light on, and went down among them, killing. He didn’t get too close, for fear of catching a hind leg in the nuts. He shot those still moving, only a few. Then he let them settle while he rolled a smoke, hunkered down by the water, his eyes closed against the spotlight. He took hard drags and spat now and then until his ears cleared. Well, there’s a quid or two, he thought.

With a machete he took the tails and threw them into the tarp on the back of the ute. It took the better part of an hour to do this and to drag the carcases into a heap away from the water. Old Wentworth, the cocky, could do what he liked with them.

He wondered for a while about going on to a dam and setting up there, because it was early yet, but he felt sluggish and lazy, and after all it was Friday night and he’d had a gutful.

He finished up his smoke. Now he could hear them all out in the wheat again, trampling, eating, swishing through. Lord, they were eating up the country! People told him that further south, and right across to Sydney it was the rabbits they were knee deep in, and emus too. It was like the Egyptian flamin plagues. They’d started dynamiting them, laying baits. Some blokes, even one over by Bruce Rock, were making double money by selling the meat for petfood. But you needed to have partners for that, and Quick was glad to be alone. He got skins most places, but some cockies, like Wentworth, paid enough on private bounty, roo for roo, that it was only necessary to take tails. He took shire bounty on foxes most green months and did all kinds of skins some time or another, but this time of year he was just culling.

He listened to the sound of a bird nearby, a sort of gasping noise at the edge of the wheat. He’d never heard it before in all the time he’d been living out like this, five nights a week. Bill was standing firm all of a sudden, and whining under his breath. Quick held the dog’s head and felt the damp, loose flesh beneath his jaw. The bird noise was a little cough out there now. He took up the rifle and cocked it.

It’s orright, boy. Looks like I missed one, that’s all. Poor bugger’s out there chokin.

It was a good fifty yards out across the roo-battered fence to the edge of the crop. Out of the spotlight now, Quick could only follow the outlines and contours of things, but he could see plain enough where the wheat was moving. A long way out, on the faintest rise, he could see the heads of other roos grazing in the quiet. Once he saw the wheat moving, he strode out beyond the spot and took the safety catch back.

He felt the hind legs in his chest before he even saw the darkness of it rearing, paws out, and within a second all he could see was the Southern Cross up there, clear as a road sign above the tight blonde heads of wheat. There was the cracking echo of the three-oh as it fell to the ground beside him — or was it the crack of his head on a stone? — and in the quiet aftewards there was the slow, strangling sound of the animal only an arm’s length away. The whining of the dog above. The sound of blood marching across him, establishing a beachhead on his chest.

After a while, the kangaroo died and gave out a stinking evacuative snort. Bill turned circles. Time proceeded. The light from the spotty on the ute began to fade as the battery juiced out. Quick watched the Southern Cross melt into the great maw of darkness.

Light comes across the sky, a great St Elmo’s fire of a thing, turning and twisting till it fishtails towards the earth and is gone.

Quick feels the blood setting like Aquadhere in his nose. He wonders where the light went. If he can’t walk he’ll die out here. That’s a dead ute, now. In a moment he’ll have to try. No use putting it off. Bound to be able to walk.

Out of the slumber of giants he comes, and there in the waking world with the Southern Cross hanging over him is his brother Fish rowing a box across the top of the wheat.

Quick pushes the sound against his teeth. Fish?

HARVEY ORANGES says the box. The oars are tomato stakes. Fish’s body is silver with flight.

Fish?

Carn.

Quick stares. The box comes to a halt a few feet out from him and Fish is leaning out, causing it to rock precariously. It’s floating up there. I’m under it, thinks Quick, I’m under water, under something. God Almighty, I’m gonna drown.

Carn, says Fish. He lowers his hand.

Quick lies still. That’s not his brother that’s a man. That’s a man’s arm.

Carn, Quick. Let’s go fishin.

Fish?

Yeah?

Am I orright?

Fish widens his eyes a moment, then closes them to let out a long crackling laugh. Quick squints at the sound of it, cowering. When the laugh is all emptied out, Fish rests his chin on the gunwale of the fruit box, looks down dreamily.

Carn, Quick.

Quick looks up, uncertain.

Carn, Quick.

I can’t.

The dog is whining, turning circles.

Quick?

I can’t, I can’t!

Ya love me?

Yes! Yeah, Fish. Quick struggles to keep the panicky weeping out of his throat. But, I just can’t move.

Fish is looking at the dog now. Bill looks back, agitated.

Where you goin, Fish?

Fish leans down, slouching the box over till you’d expect the sound of water or night sky sloshing into it and arms the dog up into the box. Quick feels a bead of saliva fall on his brow.

You goin home, Fish?

The Big Country.

The box rights itself again and Bill barks in excitement as it pulls away a little. Fish holds the dog between his knees. He’s too damn big for a fruit box. He looks bloody stupid, that’s what, a man rowing a crate. Across the wheat. Across the still waters of the sunburnt crop wherein lies Quick Lamb breathing without help, with the Southern Cross hanging above, rippling now, badly seen, beyond the surface.

He took my bloody dog.

Goanna Oil

Old Wentworth found him unconscious under a mound of boisterous flies in the afternoon, roasting like a pig at a party.

Yer bloody lucky a man wuz goin by on the orf chance! the old farmer shouted over the sound of the FJ whose gear box was shot to bits already. Yer woulda died sure as shit I reckon.

Quick watched the gravel ahead. The dog was gone, but the three-oh was beside him. He wasn’t sure about himself at all. He went to sleep.

Late at night he woke headsore and stiff under a sheet on a cot. He looked about. It was Wentworth’s place. They’d lately turned the verandah on the shady side into a sort of sleepout with flyscreens and an old chest of drawers with boyish graffiti scratched into it. It was a cool evening, though Quick could feel the heat radiating from his skin. His chest was taped and there was a bandage across his nose. He could hear them talking in there, Wentworth and his missus. And the girl, their daughter. They’d had the doctor out, he knew. Well, that took care of the week’s pay, the quack and the board they’d charge him. Wentworth had been the one to give him his first shooting job, a break alright, but the old boy was a mean bastard, tight as a noose. He didn’t give anything away, not even kindness. But I’m orright, thought Quick, I’m orright, and he sank back into a blank, overheated sleep.

Quick woke again and there was Wentworth’s daughter, Lucy. She was rubbing his blistered skin with goanna oil. He’d never really spoken to her before in all his coming and going from the homestead, and here she was, smelling of horse, her hair a dirty blonde colour, her jodphurs feasting on her.

Is that really your name? she said. Quick Lamb?

Yeah, he said as she slipped a finger into his bellybutton.

Because you’re fast? Her hands were ducking and diving under the waistband of his shorts.

Nah. No.

Quick had never been rubbed by a girl before. He’d never even kissed a girl. At school he was too sad and slow for romance. And now he looked at the short and bottley Lucy Wentworth and knew he wasn’t interested even now, but he couldn’t bring himself to object about her slipping her grabbers into his boxers.

You’re blushin.

How can you tell?

You just went red in the white bits.

He felt her grip on his dick. He was glad he’d put on clean undies last night. It was a bit of home-thinking he couldn’t shake off. Lucy Wentworth had the grip of a crop duster pilot.

I’m going to live in Perth, she murmured.

Oh? It was all he could manage in the circumstances.

I’m gonna have a flower shop. A floristry.

Mmngh?

My Dad’s gonna set me up.

Hhhyeah?

He just doesn’t know it yet.

Hhhhow long have you planned to do that?

Oh, she chuckled, I just thought of it. Only three minutes ago. I just got it all figured out. She squeezed and put him through a few manoeuvres that ended in a long, stalling climb which had Quick Lamb shuddering at the point of blackout. Then she abandoned the controls altogether and left him dusting crop at high revs.

As Lucy Wentworth went inside with a slap of the screen door Quick was contemplating a victory roll, though he thought better of it. His skin was so tight it was hurting now to breathe, and he could feel his pulse stretching him at points all over. Then he felt sort of guilty in a way he didn’t understand. For a long time he listened to the shifting timbers of the homestead, the clink of dog chain out in the yard, the cicadas dozing in the wheat.

Sleep, Quick, and smell the water leaching. Can’t you hear the boy in the boxboat calling? I’m calling, brotherboy, and you won’t come. And the waters shall fall from the sea, and the river shall be wasted and dried up. And they shall turn the rivers far away and the brooks of defence shall be emptied and dried up: the reeds and flags shall wither, be driven away, and be no more. The fishers also shall mourn, and all they that cast angle into the brooks shall lament, and they that spread nets upon the waters shall languish. From me to you, the river. In me and you, the river. Of me and you, the river. Cam, Quick!

Safety Off

In one week five cockies sign Quick Lamb up to protect their crops. They know he’s the best shot the district’s ever seen and there’s no reason why they should give a stuff about rumours. Lucy Wentworth is not their problem. Roos are. Coming on toward harvest time, as if it isn’t enough to worry about early rain, the boomers are moving in from the desert — reds, and greys alike — eating their way overland. Mobs of blokes hurtle around the paddocks at night with shotguns and crates of Swan Lager doing more damage to the crop than the plague itself and blowing each other’s ears off in a regular fashion. Quick Lamb buys an old Dodge with multiple spots, fixes himself a cage on the back to shoot from, and starts earning dinkum money.

Summer is on the land like fever. Pink zink plastered on him, Quick sleeps the day away beneath the tarp on the back of his truck. He misses his dog. Now and then he’ll spend a morning burning rooticks out of his flesh with a red-hot piece of fencing wire, then lapse back into the stupor of a western. And at night he drives to water and shoots. The bed of the truck becomes varnished with blood until the weekends when he goes to town to scrub out, cash in and sleep up. Saturday nights he sees Lucy Wentworth, or various moonstruck parts of her, in the cab of the truck, parked up some dwindling road behind a decrepit grove of salmon gums.

You’ve got a huge whanger, she says. That’s what I like about you, Quick. A head like that, it’d be eligible to vote.

He never thinks about her much, though he doesn’t object to wrestling her round the cab. He figures he’s along for the experience, and mostly he doesn’t feel that guilty at all. He looks at himself naked in the mirror. It isn’t that big. Time just goes along. It proceeds. The summer hardens.

Then a strange thing begins. One night by a dam, as he waits for the roos, he hears the familiar bashing in the wheat and raises the rifle with the spotlight ready. He hears the hacking of breath and sees the crop swaying in the dark. In comes the first silhouette, a leader, so far out in front of the rest that there’s no sign of the mob behind, and when it cracks from the dry, heady mass of wheat Quick hits the spot to get a look at the monster. But it’s a human, a man running raw and shirtless in the light. His face is tough with fear, there’s a sweat on him, and he runs right past and out of the light to the dark margins of bushland. Long after the runner is gone and the light turned out, Quick has the face burnt into his retina, because that face is his. It’s Quick Lamb barrelling by right before him.

He doesn’t call out, he doesn’t go chasing him. He rolls a smoke and thanks God that he didn’t shoot.

Coming up to harvest, it happens now and then. He’ll be sighted up by water and he’ll hit the light and see himself tearing out into the open, right in the sights, right under the first pressure of trigger, safety off. And it scares the skin off him. It starts to affect his shooting. He waits too long now, he lights up too early and loses half the mob. Quick never knows when he’ll see himself in their midst. He thinks about Fish coming in the fruit box. Am I orright? he thinks. Was he telling me true? What was he saying? Was I delirious?

The Florist Shop

Quick drove slowly through the great flat plain with her hand on his leg. The Dodge murmured away, sounding deceitfully healthy. The cab smelled of Brylcreem and old blood. Now and then, a ute passed, bellowing toward town for Saturday night, for beer and dancing. Quick wound down the window and rested his elbow on the sill. He didn’t know where he was driving — he just drove.

What’s up with you tonight? Lucy asked. She had on a small waisted dress that was unkind to her. He saw her bobby sox on the dash in the corner of his eye.

Nothin.

Make a killin this week, didja? she said with a mirthless guffaw.

Nup. I didn’t.

Must be losin your eye, Quick Lamb, crackshot.

Quick said nothing. That thing had been happening all this week, too. Seeing himself breaking out of the wheat into his sights. That made it a month, and he hadn’t shot a week’s worth in all that time.

Crackshot. Make you think of anything?

You don’t have to talk like that.

Oh, Quick. I forgot you went to church. I bet all you do is look at those old ladies’ bums.

Some of em have better bums n you.

You bastard.

Quick felt his throat tighten. I’m sorry, Luce. You shoulden push me like that. I take a lot of crap from you.

And plenty more, you get plenty more, don’t forget, crackshooter. What other girls you got in town like me?

Quick laughed. What others are there, full stop? Geez, ya haven’t got much competition.

You’re so dumb, Quick Lamb.

I believe it.

Spose you feel sorry for me.

Spose I do. A bit.

Well, you shouldn’t.

Quick shrugged. He’d slowed the Dodge so much they were barely moving. It seemed like a fine pace to him.

You think I’m a, a conquest? she said.

Nah. Nope. I never went after you. He thought: no you’re not a mountain I’d choose to climb without havin the idea put in me head.

You come by every Saturday night, mate. Isn’t that comin after me?

You asked me to, once.

Oh, you’re just obedient then?

Reckon I am. More than I should be. With you.

So it’s just you takin orders. Whip me pants off, Quick. Get me knees up, Quick. It’s just you bein obedient? She was starting to snarl now. Quick let the Dodge ride to a stop on the gravel shoulder.

Well, you have a nice way of askin sometimes.

You bastard. I taught you everything you know!

Who taught you?

You bloody bastard! You thought your dick was for cleanin your rifle before I took you in.

Did you take me in?

What do you reckon?

Quick looked at her face, green in the light of the speedo. There was always going to be something waiting for him at the end of this, and maybe he deserved it, going along without any feeling at all. Maybe he was a bastard. But things had just gone along like this without him caring either way. She was around, he was around; he got used to it.

Trouble is, she said, I got to like you.

Quick felt a hot blur of embarrassment. He opened the door. The air was warm and breadscented. He turned the motor off and got out.

Hey Quick, you’re not … are you?

What?

Leaving me here, I thought you were gonna leave me out here.

She got out, stood on the doorsill and looked across the roof at him.

Don’t be daft. I want some air, and while I’m out here I reckon I’ll take a piss, orright?

She giggled nervously: you’re a duck, Quick. A sittin duck. You’re dumber than a post.

Quick said nothing. He heard her coming round his side of the truck as he unbuttoned his flies. The sky lit up over the wheat round a bend in the road. A car coming. He tried to hurry.

Can’t you go? she said with a laugh, grabbing his arms from behind.

Leave off, willya!

The headlights splayed out across the ripe paddocks, veering through the bend. Quick shrugged her off and felt his stream ease out at last. He forced it along, knowing he was beyond stopping now. He thought he had a few seconds. He tried to be cool, but the note of the motor coming out of the bend wasn’t reassuring. There it was, bolting out of him like he hadn’t had a leak in his whole life before. Coming out of the bend, the lights hit the top of the cab. Quick tried a complete shutdown, failed, and started crabwalking for some shelter behind the truck, but when he turned round he saw Lucy standing in nothing but her bobby sox. That’s how the lights hit them, full whack, him with his dick out, and Lucy with those big breasts in her hands. The car pulled up, brakes snickering.

Evening, said the Shire Clerk.

Well, said Quick.

Quick packed up the Dodge and was gone within an hour. The town was afire with gossip and Lucy Wentworth, beside herself with happiness, began her negotiations for the florist shop at breakfast. Her father, who’d been at the dance when the Shire Clerk arrived, took out his account book to do his sums. His face was the colour of gunpowder. Mrs Went-worth wept. She blew her nose absently on the teacosy and wondered how she could ever go into town again.

Well, thinks Quick as the Dodge runs smooth and unhurried between walls of wheat into the even plain ahead. Well, that’s that. That’s that, for sure and certain. All the heat has gone out of him now and he’s noticing things. Like they’ll be harvesting here any day now, any day at all. Like he has a quarter of a tank of juice left. Like he’s not sure about himself, what he thinks, what he’ll do. He drives away from the dawn.

Outside Bruce Rock, at the beginning of the faintest morning light, he sees a blackfella standing with his thumb out and a gladstone bag at his feet. He is tall, white eyed and half grownover with beard. Quick takes his foot off the pedal a moment, but drives on. A few miles down the road he’s out by the gravel shoulder again — thumb out, bag down. Quick, who isn’t in the mood to think it through, pulls over and opens the door.

Ta, the man murmurs, getting in. He seems to fill the cab, even with the gladstone bag on his knees.

Quick winds his window down all the way and then begins to wonder.

Wanna smoke?

Yeah. Ta.

Quick passes him the pouch and watches him roll. The road goes on.

Hungry? the black man asks after a few miles.

Yeah, I could do with a bite.

From his gladstone bag the stranger takes a bottle and a loaf of white bread.

Whacko, says Quick.

The black man pulls him off a hunk of bread and Quick takes it. Then the bottle. It scourges his mouth. It takes everything he has not to spit.

What is this stuff?

Muscatel, the black man says.

It burns down inside him bringing on some unexpected comfort. They drink and eat, gliding down the road. After an hour Quick feels like he could just start in and tell this blackfella everything, the whole business. About how he took off from his family in the middle of the night, clouting the Pickleses girl with his bag. The jumping trains, the walks along the tracks, the nights he spent in dry grassbed — ded ditches under the sky. Of the jobs he took on clapped — out farms, and the shoots he went on with shickered country boys, and how he got his name as a crack man with a rifle. The way he started pulling in good money culling roos. And last night’s business. Quick gets so that his throat is itching with it, but the blackfella doesn’t say anything. He leaves no gaps for that kind of talk the way he sits there erect and shadowy in his corner of the cab. Quick taps the fuel gauge which seems to be on the blink. The wine and bread seem inexhaustible, and he has a good look at his passenger. He’s never seen an Aborigine in a pinstriped suit before. The blackfella pulls out a fob watch big as a plate and consults it.

How we doin fer time? asks Quick.

Aw, well as can be expected.

Quick feels warm with wine, and emboldened.

Where you from, mate?

Aw, all over.

I mean where’s your family.

All over.

You must have a bit of a job. That’s a nice suit.

Bit of a job.

Family business?

Always family business.

Headin for the city?

The black man nods.

Family business, says Quick, smiling to himself. And for the next hundred miles he can’t get boo out of him while the petrol tank stays on quarter full.

They roll down the baking scarp into the city where cars are parked outside pealing churches.

Sunday, says Quick.

The river flashes at them between trees.

Where can I drop you? says Quick.

Just follow the railway line.

Quick shrugs and keeps driving. He doesn’t know where he’s headed himself. South, maybe. His mind keeps coming back to Margaret River. Maybe he’ll go and see the old farm, get some work somewhere. Or maybe he’ll stay here in town, find a room, get a job, buy a suit. He doesn’t know.

They follow the line across the causeway and the river islands till they’re in the heart of the city, then beyond, until Quick’s palms start to moisten. The streets get more and more familiar.

Any place in particular? he asks uncomfortably.

They roll up Railway Parade along the grassy embankment and the date palms and weeds and fallen fences. Quick sees the great sagging west wall of Cloudstreet and hits the brakes.

Where exactly do you wanna be dropped off, mate?

The man points.

I … I … I’ll drop you at the corner.

At the corner the blackfella takes up his gladstone bag and gets out.

Comin?

Quick Lamb laughs fearfully and guns the Dodge away.

Baulking At Shadows

Quick drove until half a day later the Dodge finally ran out of juice and he woke from his steering daze to see that he had come back to Margaret River. And there was his father’s cousin, Earl Blunt, hosing down a truckload of pigs outside the town hall.

Earl Blunt, Egypt, said Quick.

Earl looked at him. Mason Lamb.

You still doin haulage.

You still doin nothin.

I need a bed.

I need another driver.

I’m hired.

Earl Blunt rolled his eyes and hosed pigs.

Earl and May lived in a truckshed by the road out of town. They had been married twenty years now and had no children. They were farmers as well as truckies, and they were rough as guts. Earl could feel no pain and he could not imagine it in others. The Depression had made him hard; war had beaten him flat and work had scoured all the fun from him. He was hard beyond belief, beyond admiration. On a Sunday night Quick saw him apply a blowtorch to the belly of a fallen cow before going back inside to pedal the old pianola for May. The land has done this to them, Quick thought; this could have been us.

Quick moved into a plywood caravan up on blocks behind the shed. The yard smelled of diesel and grease. It was full of rusting crank cases and radiators, butchered Leylands and Fords and fanbelts coiled about like exhausted snakes. In the mornings, Quick woke to the roar of bees out in the karri forest, and all day way beyond dark, he drove for Earl and May: loads of cattle, pigs, superphosphate, rail-sleepers, bricks, to Perth, to Robb jetty, Pinjarra, Manjimup, Bunbury, Donnybrook, all the time wrestling a bastard of a truck with stiff steering and slack brakes and keeping wide of the transport coppers and their safety rules. He rolled up to farms without stockyards and learnt to throw pigs up two storeys by hand. He wrung the tails of steers, he shovelled seven ton of super and did not whinge. Late at night, just for May, he double de-clutched on the pianola and tried to be happy. After all, it was 1957 and he had his whole life ahead of him. He was his own man.

Some Sundays he took his Dodge out to the old farm and parked on the boundary. The place looked good. He thought about climbing the fence and looking into the gash low in the old blackbutt to see if his threepenny bit was still there. But he couldn’t bear to know. There were a lot of things he just wanted to fail to remember. He didn’t mind being lonely; he was used to being sad, but he didn’t want to baulk at shadows for the rest of his life.

Still, Quick had old habits. On Sundays, he got the newspaper and cut out pictures of those less fortunate than him, and stuck them on the plywood walls of the caravan where they danced in his sleep like everything he ever wanted to avoid. He did not think of home, but home thought of him.

Tho Mine Enemies Rail

For a year or so Quick thought he had hold of himself. He could feel time passing without harm, and though his misery pictures danced on the caravan walls while he slept, they never woke him nor skipped into his dreams.

Earl and May fed him, worked him like a dog and told no one he was a Lamb. Locals still remembered those crazy Biblebashers and their fake miracles.

Winter bored on and he lived an orderly life in his slow, methodical way. He washed every day, cleaned once a week, and managed to see his awkward working hours out by thinking through the importance of every task. You could see it in the way he unlatched the tailgate as pigs pressed against it squealing, how he took his time at the weigh-bridge, how conscientiously he waved cars by him as he hugged the soft edges on narrow roads. And if you met him pulled into the rest bay beneath a stand of white gums along the Coast Road and you shared a smoke with him, he wouldn’t strike you as stupid. He’d seem overserious maybe, a little late off the mark when it came to getting a joke. You’d guess he was a bloke who hadn’t seen much but who was ageing somehow too quickly. There was nothing exceptional in him but for the fact that he could never seem to be ordinary. He had some mark on him, like a migrant or a priest. You could tell he was trying with you, trying to fit.

Quick Lamb drove without pausing. He caned himself with work and Earl and May could hardly believe their luck. He thought he was coping, but he was miserable, lost, drifting, tired and homesick as a dog. He didn’t think about it. He drove. He drove. He just drove.

That winter, some things happened, some incidents occurred.

Throttling the old bus rotten through the bends past Capel, crazy with sleeplessness, Quick lost his brakes on the hill before the rail crossing. The lights flashed red and he could hear the train’s diesel engine sounding its bullish horn down the tracks. He had nine ton of super on the back and now that it was mobile it wasn’t of a mind to stop. He went down through the gears like a man down a fire-escape, and when he hit rock bottom he could see the snout of the train flashing through the trees. All he had left was the handbrake and maybe the ditch at the roadside. The old knocker was hissing air and shrieking pads. The motor roared with quick comedown.

Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me, a bit of his brain said, Thy rod and Thy staff …

He was slowing, he knew it, he was pulling her back, but in the hundred yards that were left now he couldn’t expect a dead stop. He’d be rolling slowly, creeping right into the rush of freight cars.

The diesel snouted through, blurting and roaring, trucks nose-to-arse behind. The crossing lights flared. The lifeless bell tinged and tinged.

Quick hauled over to the scrub strip along the side of the road and felt logs and rubbish clawing underneath retarding him a little. He tried for reverse, but couldn’t get a grip on anything. And then he knew that all he had left was the angle he could hold and the fact that the last trucks were in sight.

Thy rod and Thy staff, he thought.

Now the wheels snicking along the tracks were all he heard as he dragged on the wheel and veered across the road to the other side where dirt lay in piles at the edge of the tracks. He ploughed it high and wide as the last truck came by and there was an almighty crack like the sound of a man’s neck breaking, and when he came back to knowing he was alive, he peered round to see his rearview mirror saluting him all the way down the tracks.

Yea, though I walk, he thought. Yea. Tho mine enemies rail against me.

He was bogged under nine ton of super and he could feel the paddock subsiding beneath him. Earl would not be impressed. Quick got out the shovel and started to dig. Right then he thought how sweet it would be to have Fish come rowing across the paddock to dip the gunwale of his fruitbox and haul him away from here.

Quick got Earl out of bed at four in the morning.

Geez, look at you. You bin sleepin with the pigs?

I just dug that bloody knocker out of a paddock. I want a couple of days off.

To do what?

Go fishin.

Earl yawned.

I nearly killed meself tonight.

Earl sniffed and scratched.

I nearly lost the truck.

It’s old. It’s insured.

I nearly lost nine ton of super.

Take the week. Use me boat. I’ll take it out of ya pay.

Earl’s Dory

At its mooring beneath the trees at the last bend before the river met the sea, Earl’s dory dwelt in a state of almost total submersion. It was so full of bird crap that there was less than an inch of freeboard and no gull could even so much as perch on it anymore without having the lot sink beneath the surface. That boat was crapped up to the gunwales, and it took Quick a whole Lord’s Day to bail the birdshit out, drag it up on the bank to roll over and scrape till it was clean enough to be tarred, caulked and painted. He spent the week on it, and in the afternoons he fished off the rocks with a bamboo rod and a jar of gents.

Late in the week, on Sunday, Quick took a couple of tin buckets full of overripe prawns and handlines, and in Earl’s newpainted dory he rowed round the bend to the great tear-shaped lagoon behind the sandbar. As he came into the flat shoaly stretch of water he met the memory of them all down here at dusk with the fire on the beach, the lantern, the net sluicing along. He set his jaw and kept rowing.

Mullet rushed in mobs across the ribbed bottom. A burnt out Ford stood back from the shore in the shade of trees. The surf rumbled beyond the bar. Quick did a lazy circuit resting one oar and pulling easy on the other. He had the feeling of movement going right through him. Water passed beneath, the trees up the bank rode by, but inside himself he felt something travel, the kind of transport he felt at the beginning of sleep when he sensed himself going out to meet its sky colour and the promises it held. He let go of the oars and just sat feeling queer. Someone walked in the shadows beyond the trees, or maybe it was a roo or just a stray cow turning. It caught his eye, whatever it was, and his insides queered up a little more. Presently, a broad, frisky school of mullet cracked the surface and bore round him, funneling down the tide ribs to the deep seaward slope of the bottom and he watched them go, that uniform mob, and felt cheered by their nerve.

The boat sat well in the water, evenly hipped and clean painted. In their rowlocks, the oars knocked and creaked with business. The working, operating feel of things pleased Quick Lamb. There was nothing more warming than the spectacle of something proceeding properly after a due amount of work. He was like that with rifles, with motors, drum reels, or some fancy madhouse’s new flushing toilet. If you didn’t know how they worked, then things weren’t worth having — something the old girl used to say.

He pulled across to the narrow point of the bottleneck where the river squeezed out in a cool tea-coloured trickle to the sea and the disturbance of the two bodies meeting caused a roily, chopbroken channel that led out through the surf to the deep beyond. Quick wedged his way into the channel, picked his moment after a set came through, and went like hell. He heard the squeaking and creaking and the airbrake sound of his breath, the bow lifting under him, pushing his bum cheeks together. The sensations were clear and momentous. The sight of foam cracking down the sides and rushing astern, the smell of salt and paint and his bait prawns on the turn. Above him, the sky like a fine net letting nothing through but light and strangeness.

About five hundred yards out, over a wide patch of sandy bottom, he dropped the hook and felt the boat hang back on it. He baited up and then it began. The first bite rang in his wrist like the impact of a cover drive, a bat and ball jolt in his sinews. From below, a skipjack broadsided and bore down on the hook in its palate, sending water springing from the line as it came up. Then he saw another lunging toward it, and when he hauled the fish into the boat, it was two fish, one fixed to the tail of the other. They thumped in the bottom round his ankles, the size of big silver slippers. He baited up again and cast out. He got a strike the moment the hooks hit the water, and then another, and when he saw the upward charge of the mob he felt something was happening that he might not be able to explain to a stranger. He dragged in four fish, two hooked and two biting their tails. He caught them cast after cast, sometimes three to a hook, with one fish fixed to the passenger fish. His hands bled and his arms ached. In his eyes the sweat rolled and boiled. Now the boat vibrated like a cathedral with all these fish arching, beating, sliding, bucking, hammering. In the water they bludgeoned themselves against the timbers, shine running off them in lurches, stirring the deep sandy bottom into a rising cloudbank until Quick was throwing out baitless hooks to drag in great silver chains of them. They shone like money. They slid and slicked about his knees. Quick Lamb’s breathing got to be a hacking just short of a cough, and in the end he stopped casting and lay back in the smother and squelch of fish as they leapt into the boat of their own accord.

The sun was a penny on each of his eyelids. Fish made space for him. They embraced him in their scaly way and he heard their mouths open and close. He felt them slide across his chest as his head sank into them, against his cheeks, along his lips with the briny taste of Lucy Wentworth’s business bits. He began to breathe them, stifle beneath them. He struggled up, began to row, and completed two neat circles before he remembered the anchor. He pulled the hook, coiled rope and chain and watched the lot sink into the mass of fish. He got sensible.

He picked a landmark to row for, and settled in for the long, methodical pull. Once, when he glanced across his shoulder to check his bearing, he saw the figure of a man walking upon the water and it made him laugh. He got sensible again and had another look.

The man seemed to come closer.

He’s on a shallow bar, thought Quick, getting desperately sensible.

He was black.

But everyone’s black at a distance, he thought.

Quick didn’t look anymore. He was fished up to the gunwales with about an inch of freeboard so that a decent lungful of air would send him under.

Just outside the surf line, the boatful of fish gouted up blood, died, and sank the boat. For a moment, Quick Lamb kept rowing because his head was still out of the water and he still had the family stubbornness in him.

When he got to shore, the blackfella was waiting for him in a pair of calico pants and a British battlejacket. Quick could see the waterline on his night blue ankles. The black man smiled. He seemed to be holding back a belly laugh.

Quick pushed past him and didn’t look back.

On the long, impossibly slow drive back to Earl and May’s with the prospect of breaking the bad news before him, Quick kept seeing figures. Along the road every mile or so, some mad bugger would jump out waving from behind a karri tree. Half the time it was that black bastard and the other half it was him. The old Dodge wheezed and Quick abused all comers. He flattened the accelerator but he still could have walked faster.

Nothing computes. Every moment, each vision and image elbows up to the next in Quick’s mind, bumping, sliding, rubbing hot and useless in him till he feels like his head is the groanstuffed hold of a ship in a gale. Out beyond the oily dark yard at twilight he climbs up into the plywood caravan, falls on his cot and lies there without knowing how the bloody hell it took him three hours to get back from a thirty-minute drive. He knows he’s not crazy, he’s convinced of it, and he’s right. But he’s not firing on all six, that’s for sure, because as he lies there, buckled and ready to stop breathing at any moment, he knows he can’t decide how he feels — enlightened or endangered, happy or sad, old or young, Quick or Lamb.

Sometime in the night, the misery pictures begin to vibrate above his head. Burnt babies, Koreans, old amputee diggers, a blind nun, they all jig on the wall, roll their eyes, hum like a turbine, sending Quick into an alertness even more discomforting and disabling.

He dreams he is asleep, and that in sleep he’s dreaming a dream: there they all are, down by the river laughing and chiacking about, all of them whole and true, with their own faces in a silver rain of light fused with birds and animals. Lester, Oriel, Hat, Elaine, Lon, Red, Fish, himself, and people he doesn’t know: women with babies, old people, men with their sleeves pinned, barefoot children, all moving behind a single file of other people the colour of burnt wood. Down at the river where the fish are leaping and the sea has turned back on itself and the trees shake with music.

This Side

I can feel it even this side of the mirror, that’s how intense it is, so strong I can sense it this far away, as far as light from a lamp, as time from a clock. Quick’s calling out like a wounded bird, seeing, seeing.

And Fish hears it from his bed in Cloudstreet where everyone’s asleep except Oriel whose lamp suddenly flickers. Lester is snoring with his teeth on the table and his arms across the boy and beneath his arm Fish stirs, hearing, beginning to hurt.

Fish begins to cry, to cry the best he knows how, and Lester starts awake.

Fish?

The boy goes on and on, teeth clenched, limbs hard as plaster, sending out his note until Lester fears he might smother him with a pillow to keep himself sane.

That cry goes on and on, through walls and walls. Shadows shake and quail openmouthed on the ceiling, the unhappy dead caught like wallpaper and groaning silently at the sound of knowing. It wakes the living and shakes even the happy dead. Even now it makes me shiver.

Load of Pigs

When Earl and May found him next day, Quick was lit up like a sixty watt globe and he wouldn’t stop crying. They brought him inside, bathed him and made him drink iced water, hoping the fluorescence would ease off. But by evening Quick’s long, bony body was giving off a light all the more clear in the dusk and he wouldn’t say a word. A doctor was out of the question with Earl and May — hell, doctors could get you in a lot of trouble, and besides if word got out about him glowing, then people’d know he was a Lamb and they’d never hear the end of it. Earl was all for letting him sleep it off, but by midnight when the boy was burning white hot, May put her foot down. Quick Lamb needed his own. Warm up a truck, she said. We’re goin to Perth.

Earl had a load of pigs in the knocker out the front that he’d been hosing down all day while they tried to decide what to do with Quick. He thought of taking just the prime mover, but he couldn’t bear to waste a trip. He’d take the pigs and cut his losses.

When they loaded the boy into the cab he lit up the dash and sent the swine into a shitting frenzy. May held him and Earl drove. Night deepened. Passing cars flashed their lights in alarm.

And a black angel, said Quick, a couple of hours north. It was all he said that night.

That woman’ll be angry at us, Earl said.

Doesn’t matter, love, said Mary.

She’ll be all over us like an angry wart.

What can we do?

She’ll think it’s a way of gettin an invite to the weddin.

She’s a mother, Earl.

Now doan start cryin.

At least she’s a mother.

They looked at each other in the glow of their relative and tried to stay calm. The old diesel hammered them in their seats. Quick saw everything in the headlights — every-damn-thing.