She Walks in Shadows(48)

I remember Lula at the door of the motel room, screaming that I had no right to be a mother, that she knew I was going to get hurt every time I rode. The only question was, How bad? Maybe a bruised leg — maybe a broken neck. Lula saying she couldn’t live like that anymore, that she wished I would just die out there, on the sand, and get it over with. I couldn’t explain about the Devil, shuffling those cards. I couldn’t explain that life was just a matter of hanging on, hanging on for those eight seconds when the world threw everything it had at you and you survived. Or not.

I always made a point of being honest with her, so in the end, I said, “Yeah, you’re right, Lula. I never should have been a mother.”

Lula was an accident in a motel room in Mount Isa where the toilet didn’t work properly and the sheets had a thin layer of red dust on them. I had beat the Devil that day. The prize money was $650 — even back then, Mount Isa had the best-paying rodeo in Australia — and the event had never been won by a woman before. There was this pretty-boy tourist up from Melbourne, doing a backpacker jaunt through Outback Queensland. Well, when you beat the Devil, you get the crazies, like the whole world is chanting your name, so I took that pale-skinned kid to the motel and nine months later, Lula was born.

Lula took off when she was 16. It hurt more than I thought it would, but I always said people should lead the lives they want, no questions asked, and if Lula didn’t want to stay with me, well, that was her business. She never wrote or rang and I never knew where she went. Laurie, who was a rodeo clown and likely my only friend, said I shouldn’t have told her about not wanting to be a mother. He said that would break a kid. But I believe in telling it how it is and what does a clown know about kids, anyway? Except how to make them laugh.

So, now, I looked at the flimsy, photocopied leaflet I’d found shoved under my door and I said to Laurie, “Looks like Lula’s found a new mother.”

We were sitting on the barrier surrounding the Noonamah arena. I’d fallen badly that day. I was starting to wonder whether I was just getting too old for the game and that pretty soon, I’d be lying in the sand for the last time, just like Lula wanted. Laurie’s clown makeup was streaked down his face so he looked like a painting that got itself rained on. He’d worked hard at the show, pulling the riders from under the broncos, bulls and steers.

He looked at the leaflet in my hand. It said, “Temple of the Great Mother,” above a blurred photo of goats, grazing in an idyllic green pasture with the ruin of a castle in the background. No place like that in the Northern Territory, that’s for sure, and probably not in the whole of Australia.

“What d’ya mean, new mother?” he said.

I showed him the penciled scrawl on the back on the leaflet. A single word written so rapidly you could barely make it out: “Mum.”

“Shite,” said Laurie. “Shite. Are you sure it’s from her?”

I shrugged. “Who else? Found it slipped under my motel room door.”

Laurie took a filthy rag out of his striped clown pants. Instead of wiping the grease-paint off his face, he just stared at it, creasing his face like he was thinking real hard.

“You know, Sam, there’s that cult down by the canyon that go by that name. Been there for a long time. A lot of folks reckon they’re Satanists or something like that. A couple of tourists hiking up that way disappeared, oh, just last year. These cult people come into town sometimes, handing out leaflets, trying to get people to join.”

“Look like a pack of goat herders to me,” I said. I hate it when people don’t get to the point. It’s a waste of time. Because I could tell by his nervy expression he was going to wander in circles like a sick dingo and waste more words, I said, “Okay. You reckon Lula’s in some kind of trouble. Well, she’s a big girl and if goats are her thing, that’s her business.”

Laurie shook his head like a sheep dog that couldn’t understand why its bone had been taken away. He was soft and that was a bad thing to be in the Northern Territory, especially if you followed the rodeo circuit.

“That canyon — the aboriginals call it a Sick Place,” he said. “It’s not just the cult. There’s some poison that comes out of the caves thereabouts. It was in the local paper. Radioactive gas or something. There’s uranium there — enough for a thousand bombs, they reckon. You could get real sick, living out there. Stupid place to raise livestock. Stupid place for people, too.”

“That cult is a pack of idiots, then,” I said.

“Maybe they don’t tell their followers about the danger, Sam. They’re a weird mob. I’ve seen them hanging around after the show, talking to the tourists. They look, well ... kinda unnatural. I’m guessing a lot of inbreeding goes on down there. Or maybe it’s the radiation. They just don’t look like normal folks.”

I grunted. “So, instead of leaving the cult, Lula puts recruitment papers in my room. That makes a lot of sense.”

“Maybe it’s not the sort of cult that lets you leave,” Laurie said and I knew he’d been waiting all along to say that.

“Maybe,” I said. I hopped off the barricade. People have a right to live their lives like they want to, good or bad. I hate people who fence things in worse than the wild broncos hate them.

Laurie scrambled after me. “You can’t just leave her there, Sam! What if she wants to go and they won’t let her? You want your own daughter to get radiation poisoning, or maybe … hell, I don’t know. Get sacrificed to the Devil or something …?”