Only Killers and Thieves(72)
Noone only glared at him. Sullivan said, “We’ll be down on our bellies anyhow—how’ll you crawl with that arm?”
Sullenly, dutifully, the overseer obeyed.
In the last of the light they walked through the scrub, Tommy’s stomach knotting with each step. The noise grew louder. The hollow clacking of the rhythm sticks and the high-pitched strains of a male voice singing. Beneath it all lay the drone of a didgeridoo, ringing around the crater like the earth itself spoke, and Tommy felt something acrid rise into his throat. He swallowed repeatedly, but the taste would not shift.
Twenty yards from the crater’s edge, Noone raised a hand and signaled for them to drop. The four of them went onto their hands and knees, and crawled through the warm, sharp dirt. Biting their palms, scraping their skin, Tommy at the end of the line, the crater peeling before him, a vast circular basin carved into the earth, so uniform it looked deliberate, as if scooped by some tool. First came the far bank, then the slow reveal of the camp below, a handful of humpies scattered through the sparse scrub, around a central clearing in which a great bonfire burned. Flames licked the darkness, sparks spiraled and danced through the air. A fire so big its makers must have thought it hidden by the crater walls. Or else they’d simply not figured on there being anyone to see; they’d believed themselves alone out here.
The last of the Kurrong numbered fifty, sixty . . . at most a hundred in all. Men and women of all ages, children, infants, dogs; must have been a good few dozen dogs. Most of the group were sitting in a loose circle around the clearing, clapping time with the musicians and watching their kinfolk dance. Others ambled through camp, seeing to chores or laughing and talking and dancing themselves. Children played. It was a convivial affair. Not much ceremony to it, though the dancers were painted in stark white lines, like they each wore their bones on their skin. Skeletons jigging in the twilight, jerking to the beat of sticks and the stomping of feet and the ominous moan of the didgeridoo. Mothers fed their babies; children joined the dancing, to the laughter and catcalls of the crowd. The dancers paused, then regained their rhythm; the singers rotated and another voice took it on, straining to be heard above the din. It was a peculiar kind of chaos but seemed innocent enough, not the hellish debauchery of the rumors Tommy had heard. They looked to be greatly enjoying themselves, lost to it, immersed in their songs and their dance.
Happy and helpless as lambs.
26
The rainstorm Noone predicted came at nightfall, and the men opened their mouths gratefully to the sky, scrubbed themselves clean, collected water in their flasks; the horses drank from puddles in the hollows of the rocks. But then the rain continued and the long night set in, and there was no shelter to be found in camp, if what they had could be called a camp at all: men huddling among the boulders and all but invisible in the gloom. The rain pattered on their hats and dripped from the brims, their clothes clung to their bodies like skin. There was no fire. Noone had forbidden one lit. The rum was gone and even when pooled their rations fell well short of a meal. So they sat. Miserably watching the distant glow of the native bonfire and listening to their revelry and smelling the trace of meat on the air. Sullivan promised a feast when they were back at Broken Ridge, but the station was many days and many miles away, and talk of a feast was just talk.
Still the rain fell. The ground became boggy and thick. There was no more talking. The rain so loud only shouting could be heard, and since shouting was forbidden, no one did. There was little to be said anyway. Those who were able, slept. Others glared grimly into the darkness, alone with their thoughts. Thoughts of elsewhere, of afterward, and of the task that lay ahead. Locke massaged his wounded shoulder as if coaxing it back to life. Sullivan smoked with his hand cupped around the cigarette end, shielding it from the wet. Noone had unfurled his bedroll and draped it over himself to form a makeshift tent, and in the dry it afforded, wiped his many weapons down. Rodding each barrel; cleaning hammer, cylinder, chambers one by one. The others soon did likewise, bedrolls popping up like toadstools among the rocks. Waddies were polished and cleaned, bayonets affixed to the troopers’ rifle ends. Noone filed the long blade of his bowie knife on the edge of a boulder stone, the sound of its scraping slicing at the air.
Tommy didn’t tend to his rifle, didn’t sharpen his folding knife. He lay upright in the valley between two sheets of rock, watching the others through the curtain of rain, watching Kala most of all. She looked near-drowned. Sitting naked and uncovered beside the sheltering troopers, dark hair lying flat on her head and her skin shimmering in the dull moonlight, slick as cooking oil. She was still muzzled. The feed bag dangled from her mouth. Total resignation in her stare. Tommy spent a long time wondering what she was thinking, then realized that he could not understand. Her thoughts were not his thoughts. Her words were not his words. He felt a fool for having tried. He turned away again. It ached him to see the state she was in. And the only thing he could do about it was not watch her anymore.
Billy was huddled against another of the rocks, smoking one of Sullivan’s cigarettes. Even had it cupped in his hand just the same. Good for warmth, Tommy supposed, though it wouldn’t have been so cold if not for the rain. Mother used to call this the wet kind of rain, like there was another kind of rain there could be. They had teased her for it but she was right: this was about the wettest there was. She was funny like that, his mother: a worrier, a thinker, she noticed the little things. Maybe that was where Tommy got it from, this second sense Noone spoke of. She liked to classify in all different ways, wouldn’t accept a thing was just a thing. Wet rain, dry rain; hard heat, soft heat; good death, bad death—might have been she was more superstitious than Tommy realized. Truthfully, he hadn’t known her, not in the way he would have liked. All he had now were memories, fractions of memories, incomplete scrapings from his past like the leavings of a fire.