Only Killers and Thieves(52)

Slowly, imperceptibly, the worst of it passed. Less anger in the wind, the patter of grit becoming more like rainfall, a hesitant half-light creeping into the room and giving the swirling dust a warm and pinkish hue. The air was choked with it, all but unbreathable, and the men fell about in racking coughing fits as they stirred. Rising ghostly from the silt, dirt tumbling from their shoulders, they blew out their nostrils, wiped their eyes, spat on the ground, and for a while simply stood there, looking about in a kind of wonderment, like the survivors of some great collapse.

Billy dug out his water flask, rinsed his mouth, spat. He handed the flask to Tommy and he did the same. The group slowly reassembling, each man brushing himself down, little bursts of chatter breaking out here and there. Noone struck a match and lit his pipe, then wandered to the open window and considered the view. Tommy dabbed water on his cuff, wiped his eyes, but the cuff was so dirty it only stung more. He winced and pressed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets and from across the room heard Sullivan laughing, “And there was you wanted to ride right through the fucking thing,” to which Locke grumbled a reply that Tommy didn’t catch.

He followed the others outside, through the back door, and stood in the ruined scullery, surveying the yard. The soil lay in contoured mounds and was piled in thick drifts against the rear of the fireplace and the west-facing side of every structure or wall. The barn was still intact. Beau and Annie were in there, skittish but seemingly well. One of the other horses had broken free. She’d cleared the yard but gone no farther than the nearby scrubs, where she pranced about madly like the earth was on fire. Two troopers went to bring her in: the old man, Pope, and the bearded one they called Mallee. They walked slowly, casually, like they’d seen all this before, extending their hands to the storm-crazed horse and talking the animal down; the horse moving slowly also, lifting and stretching out its hooves, a dreamlike fluidity in all Tommy saw. He wandered into the yard and looked east, trying to make out the storm but he could not. There was no tail to it, no wall of dirt like there had been at the front; a lingering darkness and that was all. He turned and saw Billy in the barn with Beau and Annie, stroking both horses—might have been anywhere, at home in the stables even, a lifetime from this place—and then he noticed, as his gaze slid across the yard, a nearby dirt drift and buried within it, camouflaged by the soil, a wounded but still-living kangaroo.

Tommy squatted down beside her, looked into her eye. The pupil was black and very wide, around it a damp brown film and a gathering of blood. The eye rolled side to side. Her mouth hung open and her breathing came rapidly in short little pants. Her tail twitched. Thudding into the soil. Little arms hanging limp and wizened like the arms of an old man, dirt and dust piled over her like a blanket had been pulled. Tommy hushed her. Told her it would be alright. He didn’t know what he was saying. He wiped his hand over his filthy, sweat-stained face and glanced again at the scene: Rabbit and Jarrah milling about the yard; Sullivan and Locke laughing together by the door; Billy petting the horses and Noone pacing thoughtfully with his pipe; the mare prancing in circles through the scrub and Pope and Mallee waiting for her to calm; the crumbling house and barn and the desolate nothingness all around; and then at the roo blown in by the storm and dying here before him in the dirt . . . all of this he saw in a strange tableau, like a painting on a wall, and his eyes filled at the hopelessness of this world in which they found themselves, a world he wanted no part of and yet here he was, orphaned and alone, a brother slipping away from him and a sister dying in her bed, and he—

The waddy flattened the kangaroo’s head without Tommy having realized anyone else was there. The club whipped past his face, sucking the air behind it in a fierce whooshing sound, and he only just recoiled fast enough to avoid the worst of the blood and cranial tissue thrown out by the blow. The club withdrew. Rabbit was standing over him, eyes shining, face painted in dust. He rested the waddy on his shoulder and smiled, then something caught the trooper’s eye and he glanced down the length of the kangaroo, to the belly, where first the ears, then the face of a joey came wriggling from its pouch.

Rabbit swung the waddy blade first and near-decapitated the baby roo. He wiped the blood on the mother’s hide, then collected up her tail and said, “Good tucker these buggers,” before adding, as if sensing Tommy hadn’t fully understood, “Yum yum!”

Rabbit dragged the animals to the house, the joey’s head bobbling, a bloodstain lengthening in the soil behind the roo. Jarrah greeted him excitedly. The other two troopers bringing in the mare clapped in brief applause. Rabbit dumped the roo by the scullery, and he and Jarrah set to work with their knives. The joey was freed from its pouch and hung for bleeding by its tail. The mother’s belly was slit, the innards removed and set aside. Locke began gathering palings and breaking them for firewood, and through all of this Tommy hadn’t moved. Still on his haunches in the middle of the yard, trembling faintly, his eyes very wide, a trace of blood spatter on his dust-streaked face.

*

The roos were skinned and butchered and cooked on the scullery fire, smoky from the dust, hissing with each drip from the joints and cuts piled on the rusted grate. Another fire was lit inside the house, beneath the open section of roof, flames reaching high into the cavity and shadows flickering across the room while the group ate. The whites took the joints and prime cuts; the blacks favored the organs and tail, the latter cooked in an ember pit dug in the ground. Before serving themselves, the troopers offered the organs to Noone, Pope bringing them forward on a pair of roof-shingle platters and presenting them so he could make his choice, and Tommy watched Noone take out his bowie knife and slice small pieces of liver, kidney, and heart, leaving the tail and intestines intact for his men. Something almost ceremonial in the act. The other troopers watching him too, patiently waiting in a huddle at the open end of the room, all of them shirtless now, and barefoot. No such courtesy among the whites: having each helped themselves, they sat apart along the wall, scoffing at their supper, tearing at the meat.