True West Read online

  *

  Lee got himself a glass of tap water and lit a cigarette and went back to his room. He smoked the cigarette in hard tugs. He

  prodded his nose in front of the mirror and felt nothing. It was going to hurt like hell when the drugs wore off. He could see from the thick line of bruising beneath his right eye socket that his cheekbone was fractured too.

  On the dresser by his bed was a single morphine pil . So

  Kinslow knew that he was leaving, didn’t want to supply him enough to set him free.

  Lee necked the pil . He went to the shelves and swiped his

  books into his duffel bag. Did the same to his stacked clothes in the cupboard. Knelt to his boots and felt around for Emma’s letter, which was there.

  Kinslow and his boofheads were gone. The front door was

  open to a weedy lawn flattened by tyre marks. Lee’s Ford

  was parked on the verge. He went to it and found the door

  unlocked. He keyed the ignition, and the engine turned over 64

  TRUE WEST

  but wouldn’t spark. Kinslow had immobilised it – taken out

  the rotor arm or ignition leads. Lee went inside the house

  and began to search, starting with Francesca’s room. There

  were boxes in her cupboard that he took down but the smel

  of mothbal s made him nauseous. The pill was kicking in

  and his feet felt like they were snowshoes. A creamy warmth spread through his limbs and his head was dizzy. He made a

  half-hearted tour of the hal way, rapping his knuckles on the floorboards, looking for that cache-board he’ d been told was always present in old homes. It was only when he returned to consciousness with his head against a doorframe and drool on his chin that he realised how high he’ d gone. He stayed on his hands and knees and crawled to bed.

  65

  6.

  Lee was awake but his body was asleep. Or his mind was

  separate from his body. Or his mind was floating unhampered by the noise of his body that wasn’t sending signals of pain or sensation. He just wanted to lie there and close his eyes and float on the cushion of euphoria that made him not care about anything that’ d happened over the past days, or the days that were coming. He hadn’t learned anything new about the APM

  except that they were organised enough to field candidates

  in an election. They wanted something from him beyond the

  source of his father’s weaponry contact, which he didn’t know anyway, and so couldn’t tell them.

  Lee lifted his foot from the bed and the effort was too much and that was because he was part of the bed and suffered the extra gravity of the bed. He would have liked to try this drug out in the desert. He’ d taken acid a few times with his father out in the desert after a period of meditation where they’ d sat beside an old riverbed that was pocked with the prints of goat, 66

  TRUE WEST

  emu and kangaroo. The most recent time, a year ago now, Lee had cradled his grandfather’s .303 in his lap. His senses were alert to every sound and movement in the poverty bushes and the pink everlastings that carpeted the red dirt. Above them, the pale salmon gums were tall and still and watching them

  right back. The meditation was something that his father

  had learned in Vietnam from a buddy who was military

  intelligence, and who went on raiding parties with the SAS

  and 3 RAR companies when they were out in the bush for two

  weeks at a time. For every moment of those two weeks they

  maintained silence as they crept through the jungle or hid in the rocks and waited for their enemy. Two weeks of silence

  and just watching and listening. Two weeks of eating cold

  rations, and not smoking, and burying their waste like cats.

  Some men cracked under the weight of the silence and began

  to shake and mutter, or else they ground their teeth at night and had to be gently smothered back into wakefulness. Two

  weeks of silence and night terrors and then back to base for two days of drunken R&R and then back out into the jungle for two more weeks of hunting the enemy. Like that for the

  entire twelve-month tour; two weeks of hunting and two days of R&R. Two weeks of hunting and two days of R&R.

  Lee’s father passed him the microdot of acid after they’ d sat there on the riverbank in silence for an hour. ‘You wait and see, son. The fish desires eyes that see at night and the fish develops eyes that see at night. When we focus our will on this place right here, then it’ll respond to us.’

  An hour later, Lee watched the kangaroo enter the riverbank 67

  DAVID WHISH-WILSON

  down a hollow eaten by the last floods. The dry riverbed

  opened into a braid of channels where snagged branches

  created a hide that the doe hopped around before twitching

  its ears and looking at them. Lee had never seen a kangaroo behave this way. It hopped closer and the acid in Lee’s blood began to surge and the dappled light around them began to

  blend with the wind. Lee’s father was absolutely stil . The kangaroo doe came to a stop five metres away, looking up at Lee with moist black eyes that said nothing. He looked to his father, who nodded. Lee closed his right eye and sighted with his left. He squeezed the trigger of the antique rifle and the muzzle blast reached out and struck the kangaroo down. It lay there, shot in the head, only one foot twitching to say that it had ever lived.

  His father’s knife left its sheath with a scrape. He walked down to the doe and hoisted it upon his shoulder. ‘I’ll dress her. You stay and think on what you’ve just witnessed, and

  what I told you.’

  No sooner had his father gone than Lee began to doubt what

  had happened. He looked at his bare feet on the red dirt. He smelled the campfire and pulled his knees up to his chin. Then he was walking, and then he was inside his great-grandfather’s shack, built in the 1890s out of jamwood boughs and flattened kerosene cans sewn together with wire. The corrugated iron

  roof was a single pitch against the northern sun. Dirt floor and scraps of hessian to cover the internal wal . A couple of rough-hewn stools and a sheared granite sheet that formed

  a table, perched on mulga boughs that had rusted tin cans at 68

  TRUE WEST

  their base. Fill the cans with water and strands of tobacco to keep the ants off the table.

  Lee sat on the stool and watched his father tend the fire,

  laying slices of roo meat into his smoking-frame.

  The hearth that had warmed four generations of Southerns.

  Away from the fire was a midden of sardine cans and

  ancient beer and medicine bottles, ceramic shards and rusted shovelheads. A pile of silvered sandalwood branches and

  sticks, dragged from the surrounding bush over decades and

  slowly added to the fire. Lee’s grandfather, Vernon Southern, gone religious with the isolation, had taken to the blacks’ habit of shrouding a young Jack Southern’s head with sandalwood

  smoke for the purposes of warding away the devils that

  gathered around lonely folk. Lee’s grandfather was a Tobruk rat and gold fossicker who sometimes bound himself hand

  and foot and smashed his bullets because he couldn’t shake

  the desire to shoot himself.

  Which was why Lee’s father had grown up mostly with his

  uncle Cosmo in the wheatbelt town of Dalwallinu, so that he could get some schooling. The government people had heard

  about a boy living in the bush with his old father and come looking for him. When Lee’s father returned to the camp one weekend afternoon, having walked the thirty K cross-country from Paynes Find, he found his father Vernon kneeling and

  praying before a hand-whittled Jesus of Nazareth perched on a trunk of rivergum. Beside him was a hammer, and the trunk was stained red. Vernon had nailed his hand to the wood. L
ee’s father had kicked Vernon Southern in the buttocks and with

  69

  DAVID WHISH-WILSON

  tears in his eyes demanded that he move into town and cease all the foolishness. Vernon could barely croak, and Lee’s dad had knelt down beside his father and joined him in prayer.

  ‘Son, God can see into my heart and he told me that I got

  to kill that part of me that wants to kil , and I don’t know any other way. I’m not fit to live in town until I get this done. Till I quench those pictures in my head. Till I douse that voice. Say after me … Lord, hear my prayer …’

  But Vernon Southern had returned to town, where his head

  cleared up with the help of cheap wine, regular work and a

  caring brother.

  *

  Now that the slices of kangaroo taken from the backstrap and leg were hot-smoking above the fire, Lee watched his father cut away the pale tendons from the heels and place them into a cup of water, for softening. He was making another longbow and needed the tendons and sinew for fixings. He cut out the rump from the pelvic frame and placed it into the camp oven, fixed the lid and laid it on the bed of coals he’ d dragged from the fire, shovelled more coals on the lid. The rump would cook overnight, to be carved for breakfast and lunch tomorrow.

  His father was singing some old rockabil y number in a

  deliberate country voice, making up words he didn’t know. Lee lit a cigarette and wiped his eyes with the back of his hands and looked to the sunset and longed for the cooler night air. His blood and the desert air were at the same temperature, and in the windless clearing it made him feel like he was underwater.

  70

  TRUE WEST

  He’ d just turned sixteen, and this wasn’t the first time he’ d taken acid with his father, but on those other occasions his father talked him through it. There were no hal ucinations

  this time, and he was grateful for that. He felt like being alone, walking up onto the nearest granite monolith from where

  he could see horizon to horizon in every direction across

  the mulga scrub and not a puff of smoke or sign of human

  presence. But the caves along the nearest rock face were

  spooky even during the daytime, and he couldn’t imagine

  being alone there at night.

  There were hearths in those caves that had been used for so many centuries that the coarse red granite had melted to form a smooth blackened bowl. Handprints of different sizes on the wal s, using the red and yellow ochre from the mine at Wilgie Mia that the blacks had dug out over thirty millennia, using scaffolding to get down into their pits and tunnels. According to his father, it was the oldest mine in the world, the ochre traded around Australia, right through the five hundred or so tribes that peopled the continent. Lee wondered whether the men and women who made the hand-paintings in the cave felt proud

  of that fact, or ever got to see the blood of their earth on other wal s in other lands. He knew that they were called Badimaya but no more than that. A more numerous people had come

  across the oceans and taken their land from them, and that was the reason the Knights had formed. That was the reason he and his father were out in the desert, among the spectral presences of the earlier people, which was a constant reminder of what would happen to them too if they weren’t ready.

  71

  DAVID WHISH-WILSON

  When Lee asked why Great-grandpa Donal Southern made

  his camp in the bush away from the rock, instead of using the cave system that was cool even in the heat of day, his father shook his head and replied that if Lee couldn’t figure that out, then he should spend a night sleeping there. Lee knew that

  the blacks had been cleared out by rifle and poison, and that those who remained were carted away in the back of a truck.

  ‘Was there blacks here when Vernon’s father Donal came in

  the eighteen nineties?’ he asked instead.

  ‘Sure there were,’ Lee’s father had replied. ‘How do you think he survived out here?’

  ‘So it wasn’t him that did the clearing out?’

  ‘That was the cattlemen. They came later. With their empire laws.’

  Donal, Vernon, Jack and Lee Southern. Four generations of

  Southerns who’ d camped on this dirt, the first two generations living here while looking for gold. Donal the only one who

  had any luck, and that was because he’ d been shown where to look. The story told to Lee was that, for reasons unknown, the blacks used to put nuggets at the base of trees. All Donal had to do was walk through the parklike woodland and pick ’em

  up, like a child’s Easter-egg hunt.

  Lee tried to imagine what it must’ve been like for Donal

  Southern, a convict from Glasgow who’ d slaved in Perth

  quarrying limestone before getting his ticket. Who’ d walked his wheelbarrow the four hundred miles from the coast to

  Kalgoorlie when the first strike was made. Who’ d stayed

  in the desert for the rest of his life, wandering from field to 72

  TRUE WEST

  field, until Vernon was born on this very spot. Lee’s great-grandmother dying in childbirth, her grave under a cairn not twenty metres from where Lee sat.

  ‘How did Great-grandpa Donal give milk to Grandpa

  Vernon, when he was a newborn?’

  Lee’s father had always encouraged knowledge of their

  ancestors. He felt it was important to understand what they’ d been through. Lee’ d asked the same question before, using

  different words, but never got a straight answer.

  ‘I don’t know, son. I real y don’t know.’

  Lee tried to imagine Grandpa Vernon Southern growing

  up barefoot and wild out there with no mother and no

  schooling. Both of them, Donal and Vernon, squatting on

  some cattleman’s station that they didn’t know the extent of, because it didn’t matter.

  It was Vernon Southern who first left Donal’s camp as a

  boy and moved to work the marginal wheat country around

  Northampton, and then the fishing boats off Geraldton.

  Didn’t see the ocean until he was fifteen, but when he returned from the war he lived off it for the next twenty years as a deckhand, then a second mate, then a skipper. Until his wife died of influenza, and he was stuck with Lee’s infant father, and he took Jack Southern out to the goldfields to meet his grandfather, only to discover old Donal’s bones scattered

  round the campsite by wild dogs, and dragged up onto the

  rock by the giant monitor lizards whose noses were tuned

  to the scent of carrion. It was Lee’s father who found Donal’s skul , picked clean except for the odd scrap of red hair, beside 73

  DAVID WHISH-WILSON

  the old soak in the dried-up riverbed where Lee had just

  shot the kangaroo. The skull had been scratched and clawed

  but there was a clean bullet hole in the roof with matchstick splinters on the outside. That told Grandpa Vernon how old

  Donal had been shot from beneath his face, and that the death was likely self-inflicted. Donal was a bushman and there was no chance someone had sprung him. The old man always said

  that he was going to shoot himself when the time was right.

  The country demanded it, he said. It was a tough and beautiful country and he had watched the seasons come and go and the

  animals and birds live and die. He had been a convict slave but would die a free man. Vernon and Lee’s father gathered up what bones they could find and buried him next to his wife, beneath another cairn made of red granite sheeting.

  *

  Lee’s father was busy dusting off his swag and getting ready to lie down for the night. The best part of the acid, he always said, was lying on your back in the clearing looking up at

  the night sky and the blazing stars and understanding your
/>   place in the meaningless realm. The thought that he was as

  insignificant as a speck of dust was a comfort to him, although Lee hadn’t yet made peace with his inevitable fate. He angled his head in the direction of the giant red rock, silent and looming in the darkness. His father squinted, but nodded. Lee took off his shirt and his boots and without a torch padded off on the dusty path toward the rock. The moon hadn’t risen, and outside of the firelight it was so dark that he couldn’t 74

  TRUE WEST

  see his hand. The dirt beneath his feet turned to rock, warm where the granite held the day’s sun. The rock sloped upwards and his eyes adjusted to the dark and the rough granite held the grip of his feet. He walked with his hands ready to take his weight if he fell into one of the namma holes that were dry and papered with dead moss. The stars so bright that they hurt his eyes, the dark slope rising to a rounded peak that he sat upon, and looked to the horizon east where the moon

  would soon rise.

  He kept his eyes open and senses keen. The air on his skin

  was cool as the desert cooled, the rock beneath his arse and legs warm. He tried to concentrate on the sounds of the desert woodland where herds of goat were followed by wild dogs, and where rabbit, camel, fox, donkey, wildcat and boar searched for food in the dark. Kangaroo, emu and snake. Spider and

  poisonous centipede. The birds asleep in their roosts: swallow and zebra finch and budgerigar, chitty-chitty, raven, black kite and wedge-tailed eagle.

  As he often did when he was alone, Lee thought of his

  mother, who he barely remembered. A boy raised by wolves,

  Mrs Doyle, one of his teachers, had once muttered when Lee’s father and his fellow Knights picked him up from school in

  their dirt bikes and Landies, dressed in army surplus camo

  gear and amped on speed for weekend exercises in the desert.

  Lee didn’t know much about his mother, and what little

  he knew had taken fifteen years of dragging out of his father.

  That her name was Mandy. That she liked to read, and taught Lee to read. The story of his father taking her from her

  75

  DAVID WHISH-WILSON

  Mullewa home. Their weekends along the coast, surfing the

  remote breaks. That she liked The Rolling Stones. Her beauty.