WesterlyMagazine

The Cook

Cue was eighty k to the east. Lot of country between us. We would probably be safe here.

Not a lot of other options.

It’s a feudal world, the drug trade. My only other choice is to go to Mastic, bow and scrape, swear undying loyalty. Hope he can protect us.

Or go dog for Ogilvie, and hope for the same.

But no legs in either option. Once I’m no use, they’ll burn me to trade up, part of the game.

 

The sun has nearly gone and the light softens in the warm shade. Tiny tree frogs begin their migration from the gnamma holes to the grass and nearest scrub. A babbler singing on the rock. The sparrowhawk flies over for another look.

I watch the water drain into the soak clear and sweet, lob the shovel into the grass and carry the rifle over to the camp. Danny’s still leaning against the gum, staring up at the rock, at the fat retreating tail of a giant bungarra, belly scraping rhythmically on the rock, flicking tongue tasting the air.

‘It walked right past me. Wasn’t scared at all.’

‘Top of the food chain. Probably the same lizard I used to see here, twenty years ago. Dad used to shoot goat for it. The odd feral cat. Lives in a cleft of rock up there. A good sign. Keeps the snakes away.’

‘Talkin like a bushie already. What’s the plan? Stay here for the night? I’m gettin real sick.’

‘Don’t be an arse. If you’d killed Warner, we might go back, one day. Years from now.’

‘A hospital. Morphine, for my bust wrist.’

‘Not a chance. We’re here until I figure it out. I’ve got some pills.’

Danny’s face turns ugly again, and I know the look.

‘Can you walk?’

‘Sure. But I need some pills.’

‘One pill, every few hours.’

Danny’s first time coming off. I’ve done it a hundred times, maybe more, and it will be hard to watch him suffer.

He thinks it’s bad already.

Before it starts I want to show him the mine. We walk through fifty yards of scrub, ancient trees evenly spaced, has the feel of an orchard planted by a careful hand, everything radiant in the last warm light, to the edge of the mineshaft.

‘Careful.’

My hand across Danny’s chest. Just a big hole in the ground, vertical, my grandfather’s hand-sawed boughs framing the edges, perfectly square, dug out with a pick and shovel.

‘Why here?’

I shake my head. ‘I’ve always wondered that. Don’t think my dad knew either. Just that it produced a bit, for his dad. Between them, they worked it for close to twenty years.’

‘He died out here, didn’t he?’

I ignore the question, looking down into the hole. ‘We’ll have a better look tomorrow. But first, what my father told me when I was your age. Don’t wander. At first, all the trees look the same. It’s easy to get lost, and hard to get found. In this heat, you’ll last two days without water … three at the most.’

‘But the rock.’

‘You can be fifty metres from the rock in this scrub, not see it. Just do as I say. Don’t wander off.’

‘Ok.’

We’re nearly back to the rock when I hear the chopper. It’s gone dark enough for the searchlights to stand out against the red horizon, the clear twin beams of white light sweeping towards us.

We make it to the cave before the police chopper sights us, turning slowly around the edge of the rock, looking for our camp, but the searchlights make one thing clear.

Either Warner has a mate in the local coppers, out doing his bidding, perhaps even up there with a rifle, or else the fire at the 25 wharf got too big for Warner to control. Meaning there’s a general manhunt out for us. Meaning every copper in the state is on our tail.

If it’s Warner pulling the strings, and they find us, we’re dead.

Warner’s name is on the line, and he will never give up. Plenty that went up in smoke, not covered by insurance.

Beyond forgiveness now, or recompense.

Even for a prized cook.

I dose Danny with three pills at once, bed him down in a nest of blankets, leave him a pot of water, the rest of the food, scratch crude directions into the cave floor, should I never return.

Walk out into the night, rifle over my shoulder, the full moon rising over the eastern horizon, enough light to drive by.

It takes me five hours to make the road, following our earlier tracks, another hour to get into the Cue town site, make the roadhouse just before it closes. Fill up the Charger, pay using Danny’s credit card, make sure my picture on the servo surveillance video is clear. Do the same at the bottle shop. Hope to Christ the coppers don’t get me in town. I’ll have to go down shooting. The strong possibility that one of them is owned by Warner. Don’t want to be beaten to death in the Cue cells. Don’t want to give up Danny’s location. Don’t want to not give it up, under torture — leave him out there alone, helpless.

I make small-talk with the bottle-shop owner, mention I’m camping at Walga Rock, take my half-carton and leave. Watch from my car to see if he runs to the phone.

He doesn’t, which is not a good sign.

Coppers are looking, but not asking.

I return along the dusty track beneath the risen moon and make camp not far from Walga Rock. A big fire, within plain sight of the road, near the car. Pile a few bags under the last two blankets, on the ground by the fire, two sleeping scarecrows, then walk back to the road with the leaf-blower, use it to blow away the car-tracks into the first fifty metres of bush the other side. When I’ve built up the graded lip again and I’m sure that our track is covered, I retreat back to the nearest flank of Walga Rock with the rifle, spend a night shivering and watching the road, herd of goats using the wallaby path behind me, coughing and snorting, my smell like an odd dream among them. I leave the rock only to keep the fire at the camp going, the urge to lie down and sleep strong.

Back in my stone eyrie I keep myself occupied cleaning the .303 by moonlight, with screwdriver and strips of my shirt, hope to hell the sight is still good. Count the stars coming out as the moon sinks to the horizon, as the inky darkness settles for an hour before the first flushes of dawn, there behind the distant lights of Cue.

I hear the chopper just before the sun spills red over the horizon, high up in the dark sky, just the distant syncopation among the winking stars, one of them moving slowly around the rock. I crawl beneath the nearest wedge of granite, to mask me from their infra-red, and settle down to wait. I’d placed the two swags as near the fire as possible, the whole camp glowing white on their screen.

It’s working as I hoped. One of Warner’s copper stooges in Perth, alerting him to the time and place of Danny’s credit card use, last night. The chopper sent out to confirm the campsite. Warner likely on a light plane these past hours, Perth to Meekatharra, the short drive from there to Cue.

He’ll be coming armed, in company. He’ll want his money back, but this isn’t about money.

An execution.

An example.

Done himself.

The chopper circles for a while then heads back to the town, dropping in altitude. I hunker down on the cold granite ledge and draw a bead over the plain, looking for plumes of dust.

The thought of Danny, probably awake now, shivering and sick.

The certain knowledge that if I die, he dies too.

The last of us. The only good one.

I’m trying, but it doesn’t feel real. The .303 heavy in my hands, the rifle my father taught me to use, when I was Danny’s age.