Only Killers and Thieves(50)
That night they camped in open scrub, beneath a pair of coolibahs, the troopers alternating watch while the others ate and slept. Another low fire, another meal of dry stores, everyone wary, watching the open plains, not much talking and no trouble this time between Locke and Noone. Tommy didn’t like looking out there. He could see only so far and then nothing, total darkness, a shadowland filled with his fears. He imagined wild blacks circling, dogs prowling, snakes sliding into camp. When he lay down to sleep he kept hearing them, their footsteps and low moans, and though he knew it was only the troopers patrolling, that knowledge did not make him feel any more safe.
*
In the afternoon of the following day they came across a dwelling house, sitting lonely and incongruous on the empty plain. Noone halted the group a half mile clear. They gathered in a line and watched the house, tiny at that distance, quiet and still. The posse waited. Hot wind ruffled their clothing and whipped dust across the ground; the horses shook off the flies. Noone extended a brass spyglass and studied the little house, and Tommy watched him while he did. The idea seemed faintly magical. Bringing the distance closer, moving yourself near.
Noone lowered the scope and contracted it again. They walked the horses on, toward the house, the line fragmenting as they went, Noone and the troopers in front, the other four whites behind. The young trooper grinned at Tommy excitedly, nodding and pointing and bouncing in his saddle.
“Look at him,” Sullivan muttered. “Little bastard’s keener than a bitch in heat.”
They halted again a hundred yards short. All eyes on the ruined house. Its walls were still standing but the roof was part-caved, a hole in the shingles on the right side. There was one uncovered window and the door was open, no front yard to speak of, uncleared scrub right up to the walls.
Noone raised his chin. “Jarrah,” he said. “Take a look.”
The trooper with the eye scar dismounted. He handed off his reins, checked his rifle, set out walking through the scrub. No hesitation, no pause. He carried the rifle by its forestock and walked casually to the house, as if he already knew it was safe. Tommy didn’t trust it. Didn’t trust the silence, the darkness inside. He watched Jarrah breathlessly, followed his every step, like he too was approaching that open door . . . and Father lying slumped beside it, three holes in him, and Mother behind the curtain, missing half her head.
Tommy turned away, couldn’t watch. He took out his flask and drank, kept his eyes on Noone instead. He looked almost bored. Hands folded in his lap, fingers drumming; he took a long breath and sighed. Tommy glanced back at Jarrah. He was creeping along the front wall. He ducked his head through the window, then went to the door, and Noone ordered him inside with another jut of his chin. Jarrah slipped in through the gap. Tommy stared at the darkened doorway, expecting a gunshot, a cry, lost in the trauma of what might be in there, and didn’t see the trooper emerge from around the back of the house.
“Empty!” Jarrah shouted; Tommy flinched and dropped his flask and the last of his water glugged onto the ground. He jumped down to retrieve it, peered into the mouth, but there was barely anything left. The others set off for the house and Tommy looked forlornly at Billy, who only shrugged.
“Might be a well,” Billy said, before turning and following the group in.
There was no well. They rode around the house, into the rear yard, and found a three-walled barn and rusted wire coop, and by way of a scullery an open stone fireplace and the rubble of a collapsed chimney stack. Crumbling wooden palings lay about in piles and there was a spool of old fencing wire, but not even the yard had been properly cleared let alone the surrounding land. Maybe someone once intended grazing here, but there were no signs of cattle having ever been run.
Noone dismounted, went to the back door, leaned his head inside, then poked about the scullery with his boot. He wasn’t wearing his longcoat, and his collar was open and bare, nothing official about his appearance anymore. He picked through the rubble and turned up a shelf and a fire grate and a rusted iron skillet, lifting them one by one from the dirt, then tossing each aside. He crouched and inspected the leavings in the open fireplace.
“Anything?” Sullivan called.
Noone took a long time to answer. “You know whose place this is?”
“Never knew anyone was out here. Crazy bastard’s doomed.”
“Well, someone built it. And there’s a fire inside not a couple of days old.”
“Was it them?” Billy asked. “Joseph and that lot?”
Noone ignored him. He and Jarrah walked back to the group. Billy went to ask again but Sullivan told him quietly, “Don’t push it, son. Leave all that to me.”
They moved on. Mile after mile and still the ranges seemed no closer, lying on the horizon like something buried there. Easy to question whether they were even real, wavering like a mirage—many times out here Tommy had blinked and some landmark had shifted or disappeared. The shimmer of a waterhole. A flurry of wild dogs. A native warrior, ochre-painted, standing with his spear at his side; on second glance a termite mound or tangle of bare tree limbs. The heat working its spell, the sun directly ahead of them, blasting in their faces, swollen by a wind that seemed to build with every gust. Tommy was parched. Lips cracked, throat burning; his eyes so dusty it stung when he blinked. Gamely he tried sucking another lemon lolly but it hurt just to swallow and he spat it on the ground.