Only Killers and Thieves(47)

“Fuck off with you.”

“Alright, that’s enough. Both of you pack it in.”

“You know,” Noone said, ignoring Sullivan, “by Darwin’s logic you are bottom of our particular evolutionary pile, a throwback even amongst whites. In fact, there must be some overlap between the very lowest of our caste and the most evolved blacks. I should make a study of you, before your kind becomes extinct.”

Locke raised his revolver and pointed it at Noone. Noone did not even flinch. He leaned against the tree and picked at his meal as if Locke and his weapon were not there. When his eyes flicked up to look through the flames, the stare was steady and cold. Already Sullivan was crawling to Locke’s side, telling him to stop, grabbing his pistol arm and pressing the rum bottle into his hands instead. Locke shook his head and relented. He swigged a long mouthful of rum, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then flapped out his bedroll and lay down, his back to the group, his head cradled in the crook of his arm.

“Night-night, Raymond,” Noone whispered. “Sweet dreams.”

Sullivan spluttered a laugh, tried to muffle it in his hand. Locke gave no sign of having heard. Tommy smiled nervously but kept his head down, unsure what was expected of him, whose side he was supposed to be on. This kind of banter was new to him. Father had not been a bantering man. Now here were two strangers teetering on the edge of violence as casually as if they were shaking hands.

Sullivan took another drink, belched, then he too turned in. Billy unrolled his swag, Tommy did the same, then he staggered to the tree line to piss. Facing the low branches, his piss drumming into the soil, he searched the darkness for signs of the troopers out there. He couldn’t see them. Probably facing the wrong way. Or else they were so expert at staying hidden in the bush that one could have been right in front of him and he wouldn’t have known. He squinted drunkenly. The rum had taken hold. Imagined that young one with his madman’s eyes staring back from the night. Or the oldfella with his hollowed-out face, or that one with the melted brow . . .

Hurriedly Tommy buckled himself and came back into camp. All of them save Noone was asleep. He was still leaning against the tree trunk but now had a stump of firewood in his hands. He was whittling it with his bowie knife, picking off the shoots one by one. He watched Tommy climbing into his roll; Tommy turned his back on the fire. He lay there listening to the knife blade scraping the bark, then closed his eyes and tried to sleep. It didn’t seem real that he was here, in this camp, with these men, all that had gone before. Not four nights ago he was lying in his own bed, Billy alongside him, dreaming about Wallabys in the wet. They’d never go back there, he realized. So much had been lost. He would never think of that waterhole without remembering: every memory, not just Wallabys, every memory was tainted now. One way or another they all led to that day, to the house at sunset, to what was inside. There wasn’t anything else. Nowhere he could go to forget.

*

His own name woke him, a whisper in the night. He opened his eyes and lay listening. “Tommy, Tommy . . .” Noone called across the clearing, repeating his name like a chant. Tommy rolled over to face him. The fire now low and smoldering, little more than a dying glow, and beyond it the dark figure of Noone still leaning against the tree, whittling another branch, longer than the first, stroke after careful stroke.

“Ask me about the lake,” he said.

Tommy sat up slowly, clutched his bedroll to his chest. “What?”

“The lake you saw today. Ask what it’s doing there.”

Noone’s voice was slow and heavy, changed somehow, slurred like he’d been drinking all this time Tommy slept.

“How’s he got a lake in the middle of a drought—wasn’t that what you said?”

“It’s not my business. I didn’t mean nothing by it.”

“To which your brother replied . . . ?”

Tommy hesitated before he answered: “That you don’t get a lake. You either have one or you don’t.”

“Precisely. Do you agree with him?”

“I don’t know. It looked strange, that’s all.”

“So it should. Drought’s crippling the district, most of the colony, in fact, and yet here’s John Sullivan with an abundance of water and cows fatter than a whorehouse madam. Am I right?”

“I shouldn’t have said nothing. Sorry.”

“It was very astute of you.”

They sat awhile in silence. The knife blade whispered against the wood. Smoke from the fire wound its way through the branches and into the night.

“Are you able to keep a secret, Tommy?”

“I think so.”

“Come on now. Either I can trust you or I can’t.”

“Alright, then.”

Noone paused. He held up the branch and studied it. He had whittled it into a neatly tapered stake, roughly two feet long, with a hollowed-out section partway down. He set the stake and knife aside, then leaned into the fire glow. A redness crept over his chest and face, and the tip of his tongue wet his lips before he spoke.

“He dams it. The river. He dams it, then drains it into reservoirs that feed only his land. Your family gets his runoff. You and everyone else downstream.”

“But how can he . . . ?”

“There’s a word for it. Peacocking. Have you heard of this phrase?”