Only Killers and Thieves(43)
Billy nodded like they’d resolved something, walked away down the hill.
15
Nobody came to see them off. Nobody stood waving on the verandah; there were no faces in the windowpanes. As he rode away down the track, Tommy looked back at Mary’s bedroom but all he saw was the outline of the drapes. As if she might have been standing there, ghostly in her nightgown, her little hand raised. Dr. Shanklin was coming to care for her, was expected later that day; she’d be recovered by the time they returned, so everyone said. Billy believed every word of it. He saw things as simply as that. Mary would get better, Sullivan would take them in, their grief would soon pass, and justice would be done. Like knocking down tins on a stall.
Sullivan and Locke, Tommy and Billy, four horses passing by the workers’ camp and then out along the same trail the boys and the watchman had taken coming in. The horses were laden with supplies: bags bulging, bedrolls bouncing, weapons and accoutrements hanging from their saddle rings. Pistols, Snider carbines, ammunition belts, bayonets; the silver blade of Locke’s sword slapping against his thigh. Tommy had only his rifle and the folding knife he’d stolen from Song’s, but Sullivan had given Billy his own revolver, a six-shot Colt Navy he wore like a trophy on his belt. He hadn’t told Tommy about it. But then neither had he attempted to hide it from his brother’s view.
They rode through the scrub and between the scattered trees, and when the track forked they followed it northwest. The sun warm and gentle, early morning still, the bush filled with chirruping and chatter and indifferent to the passage of these horses and men. Tommy closed his eyes and listened. Sounds of his country, sounds of his home. A sickness in his stomach at what lay ahead, though in truth he didn’t fully understand. Vague notions of justice, of revenge, and with them a vague and hopeless dread, the fear a lonely child feels after dark, knowing the bunyip is out there, that it’s coming for him, that it cannot be outrun.
Noone was waiting in open ground another half mile to the west. He sat his horse ahead of his troopers and watched them come, small clouds of his pipe smoke drifting on the breeze. His horse flicked its tail and shook away the flies, and behind him the troopers were mounted in a crooked line, four indistinct shapes on horseback, three slouching forward in the saddle and one sitting tall and very straight. Tommy scanned the figures but couldn’t properly make them out. Little details only: two were bigger, one was young, the one sitting upright looked withered to his bones.
“Don’t talk to the niggers,” Sullivan warned. “Treat ’em like you would dogs.”
“Worse than dogs,” Locke added. “Vermin. Fucking snakes.”
They walked their horses over the final stretch and came to a halt in front of Noone, the inspector smoking like he hadn’t noticed them arrive. How much did he see? Tommy wondered. How did the world look to him? Once in Bewley there’d been a beggar with eyes no different to Noone’s—children bared themselves in front of his face and he hadn’t ever known. But Noone wasn’t blind. Far from it: he’d picked them out of those Moses bushes from half a mile away.
Tommy watched the troopers furtively under the low brim of his hat, snatching quick little fragments and assembling them into a whole. Four natives, dressed in scruffy, ill-fitting uniforms: white trousers, blue tunics, white hats, the clothing tight or hanging off them, meant for other men. Cartridge belts slung across their chests, the leather faded and worn, every loop full. Martini-Henry rifles stowed in saddle holsters or carried on their shoulders, wooden war clubs dangling from their belts, the smooth-polished blades marked and bloodstained, the stains faded and very old. Scant supplies on their packs: water bags, weaponry, little else besides. A range of ages between them: the one sitting upright was ancient, skeletally thin, his hair receding from his forehead and half-moon cheeks hollowed and drawn; the youngest too was slightly built, sinew and bone, his face bat-like in the protrusion of the jaw, the high and heavy brow. He was smiling. A fixed and absent grin. As if instructed to make sure he bared his teeth full.
The other two troopers were similar in both age and build. Big men, twenties, thirties maybe, broad in the shoulders and full in the chest. A lazy kind of violence in the way they leaned: one was bearded and dead-eyed, a stone-still stare at the ground; the other was smoking a rolled paper cigarette pinched between thick fingers, nostrils flaring as he exhaled. Tommy had never seen a durry-smoking native before, but he did it as expertly as any white, with one eye half-closed in a squint against the smoke, Tommy assumed, until he noticed the knot of scar tissue webbing the brow and eyelid, gumming the eye like drippings of candle wax.
And supposedly they were policemen. Supposedly they were safe.
“Well?” Sullivan asked. “What’s the holdup? What we waiting for still?”
Noone withdrew the pipestem from his mouth and exhaled.
“We’re waiting for you, John. Been waiting a long time. This is not dawn.”
“Aye, well, there was a lot to get done before we left.”
“So already you’re slowing us down, with your monkey man here and these two orphans you’re now intent on dragging around.”
“I’ve told you not to call me that,” Locke said. “Bloody mean it n’all.”
Noone cocked his head and studied him. “You’ve injured your hand, Raymond. What happened? A little overzealous with yourself last night?”