WesterlyMagazine

The Cook

Dawn finds us out in the mallee scrub, beyond the wheat-belt and into cattle country, headed north. The dirt reddens and the heat falls hard and granite mesas rise out of the plains and dry gullies. Beneath the gnarled trunks of the mallee and currajong and corkwood the horizon fills with a floating carpet of pink and white everlastings, surreal. Danny is in a bad way, and I fix him twice in cutaways beneath the feathery shade of beefwood and quandong, but then the packet is done. I’d stopped at a 24 hour chemist on the way out of Bassendean, had bought downers, painkillers, burn-salves, bandages, whatever they had. The blankets from the beds in the flat. Stuff from the cache of stolen property in the bedroom cupboards, to trade perhaps, some cameras, binoculars and a telescope, a fucking leaf-blower, some mobiles and laptops, miscellaneous tools.

That was before I looked inside the bag in the boot. Saw the cash, banded and loose, range of colours, no time to count it — and a handgun, a .38 S&W snubnose, no bullets.

I pay for petrol with cash at Payne’s Find roadhouse, buy food for a few days, put us back on the highway north. The vintage two-door Charger is a distinctive ride, but eats the road between the towns, a few more hours we’re in Cue. I take a dirt road before we hit the main street, buildings like a stage-set in a Hollywood mirage, then head west towards the Rock, parachute of dust curling over the floodplain of poverty bush and salt-grass, the abandoned gold diggings of Big Bell on the horizon north.

We get to Walga Rock when the sun is overhead, Danny still dazed and mute, angry because I’d chosen Warner, but afraid of what he’d done. The Rock slopes high and red beside the road, granite dome filling the sky, plated like a half-buried turtle, a lone wedge-tail circling in the higher thermals. I drive the opposite direction over the graded lip of red gravel and twenty yards into the bush. From here on there are no roads. I return to the lip and build it up again, sweep over our tracks with a mistletoe switch. It’s slow going, lost in the low scrub, every now and then getting out to climb a beefwood, trying to catch a glimpse of the blue-grey monolith to the east, no name beyond what my father and his father called it, home.

It takes four hours to drive the twenty k, at walking speed. Danny is too sick to get out and guide, and not wanting to stake a tyre, I circle round the fallen acacia and dry gullies over plains of purple mulla mulla and flannel bush and everlastings, knee-deep dry grass, plovers and bush-quail sailing off in brief clucking parabolas, waves of locusts rising like a parting sea. It’s hot on the vinyl seats, but the setting sun to the west is the best compass I have. Working slowly through a clump of fruiting quandong, hundreds of green and red budgerigar chirruping above us, I see the sparrowhawk and know we’re close. It glides above us, taking a good close look through unblinking eyes, circling before rising off the scrubline in an effortless arc. I remember that the sparrowhawk feeds on the swallows at the rock, and follow it. Soon the broad red flank of the granite monolith looms before us, a couple of hundred metres high, unlikely as always in the broad flat plain, the red dirt around it as trackless as I’d hoped. We circle round to the eastern side, into the shade, looking for my father’s camp, marked by a screen of casuarina and the quandong planted by my grandfather, its seeds buried beside jam wattle saplings, to feed off its roots.

I drive the Charger into the cleft of rock that curls beneath an overhang, invisible from the air, and turn off the ignition. Immediately the eerie silence settles over us, just the ticking of the overworked engine.

I help Danny climb out of his seat and sit him against the smooth trunk of a leaning redgum. Light him a cigarette and set off to get firewood, dragging the dry mallee boughs caked in dirt, a few sticks of sandalwood. I set a fire in the cave, in the ancient fireplace used for so many thousands of years that the rock has melted into a scoop, ochre handprint of a Wadjari child on the smooth wall above. When I leave the cave Danny’s still slumped against the tree, but has lifted his sunnies, watching a young male bower-bird perform for him, flacking its wings in a fan dance, hopping on its thin legs.

The anger that made Danny do to Warner what I wouldn’t is gone now. Won’t meet my eye.

‘What’s that?’ he asks.

‘Bowerbird. Young male. No pink on its back. He’s trying out his moves on you.’

‘So I shouldn’t laugh.’

‘How’s your neck? Your arm?’

‘Flies are bad.’

‘Wipe your arse with your shirttails, keeps the flies away from your face.’

‘Really?’

‘No.’

I lift the collar of his shirt and pull back the gauze on his burn, still angry red but the blisters have stopped weeping. Important to keep the flies off, so I set about applying the salve over the dry powder I’d caked it with earlier; lay down some new gauze.

‘That one of your dad’s sayings?’ he asks.

‘Good guess.’

‘Don’t piss on my back and tell me it’s raining.’

‘You remember that?’

‘Sure. He’s tighter than a stocking on a chicken’s lip. Face like a pox-doctor’s clerk.’

Image of my father, face red with drink, propped up at the Fremantle Workers Club, the idiom of his generation bustling in the air, laughter.

Before he went mad, wouldn’t leave his room, pissed off out here with his rifle and a single bag of clothes.

‘I ever tell you about this place?’

‘No.’

‘You need water?’

‘I need hammer.’

‘None left.’ Danny’s face goes ugly for a moment, brought back to normal with a strained effort. ‘S’alright. My fault. All this.’

‘Wait here. Watch the show.’

The bower bird, who’s been silent and watching while we talk, resumes his dance as I leave the camp, zebra finches techno-thrumming in the mistletoe by the cave. I walk up onto the rock, and climb through the fading light onto a ledge that looks over the desert, mallee scrub to the horizon in every direction, a mob of kangaroo grazing near the soak. The gnamma holes on the rock still hold fetid water, tadpoles squirming in the shallows; poor man’s caviar, my dad used to call them, swallowed them live and whole, as his father had taught him.

Beneath a slab of red granite streaked with long quartz veins I pull out the oilcloth and sports bag, shovel and pick, ammo box filled with Dad’s cutlery, ledgers, tools.

It takes two trips but I get the lot down to camp, leave it near the old fireplace, coals glowing. Unwrap the .303 from its oilcloth. Grease is clean and golden. No sign of rust. Not enough moisture in the dry desert air. Bullets dull brass in their cardboard cartridges, couple dozen of them. I load one into the breech and sight on the mob of goats that have come down the rock to observe, the billy goat coughing, staring at me down the sight, never seen a human before. I sight on the smallest kid, take in his colours, for later, when the food runs out. My father lived out here on goat and grass seed johnnycakes for months at a time. Quandong in season. Tadpoles. Frogs. Bush turkey. His father before him. Famous among local prospectors. Had been so confident he’d found El Dorado he’d traded a ten ounce nugget for a crate of sherry, before the hole went dry. It was when Grandpa died that my father followed him out here, worked the hole deeper into the granite and greenstone bands, gelignite and pick and shovel, mercury and cyanide extracted, right through summer. Dug out enough to pay for his smokes and bullets, but not much else. Everything listed in a shivery hand in his ledgers.

I take the rifle and the shovel and go and dig out the soak, hefting the dry sand that becomes damper, the rifle laid over a rock beside me.

The soak begins to fill with muddy water, and I keep digging. I had a lot of time to think on the drive up. We could live out here, make furtive trips into town, pay with cash. This is somebody’s land, part of a cattle station the size of Victoria, no reason the owners would ever find us. My father and his father had never cared whose land it was, had always kept the .303 handy. This wasn’t the kind of country you walked up on someone unannounced, even if you were the owner. Hunters out here. Prospectors. Fugitives.

But Warner is still alive, and Warner knows my father’s diggings were near Cue. The logical place for a city-boy to run, with Danny.

Warner knew that I was going to have a crack at him. Most likely, he would have offed me after a couple of good batches. But he wouldn’t have expected it from Danny.