Our Sunshine: Popular Penguins Read online

  I asked Joe whether it was hard shooting his oldest friend close up like that, in the face and chest.

  He said it was easy once he knew for sure. Same as a kangaroo – no, the same as a steer. Someone else’s. The taste of blood came into his mouth then too, like he’d bitten his tongue. Warmish and sweet but without the pain.

  What had made him angriest was when Aaron started putting on airs and graces with his police money and affecting an accent like a grazier’s. He forgot he was just some shitkicker’s son like us.

  Yes, I guess he’s cold enough now to call him Judas. He offered to spy on us. Said he and Joe had been in crime together all their lives. Told Hare our plans, led him to our hideouts, wanted to get us shot or hanged. Take my word for it. Aaron had to go.

  Jesus, wanting to be liked by both sides, giving secrets in order to be liked, taking money – how could that work? Hiding behind women’s and policemen’s skirts and still getting splattered like any soft-eyed roo shot by lamplight.

  Aaron’s child-bride Mary took the murder very bad. Her mother too. They were both there at the shooting. The four troopers guarding Aaron were quite upset as well, if their muffled pleas from under the bed were any indication.

  He and his father were always quarrelling over Aaron’s Catholic girlfriends – Joe’s sister Kate, my sister Kate too and finally Mary Barry that he married. Aaron didn’t share his old man’s Protestant beliefs, or his girls’ Catholic ones. Aaron believed only in the moment. Well, he’s had his.

  BUT THE trouble with killing Aaron was that now he’d never know for sure why he’d done it.

  Money was too simple. Their manner the day they rested in his hut at Sebastopol must have got his goat. Their new, no-bullshit, serious-outlaw air. They were stealing a lot of thunder these days and maybe Aaron wanted some limelight too. Plus the Maggie and Joe affair. Half-jealous over fame and sex and then Hare manipulating the rest. Putting ideas in his head. Telling him he was someone.

  Just guesswork. But his mother had never trusted Aaron. She was a good judge of men’s characters, except when they were after her.

  AT NIGHT she pads naked around the crowded, sleeping bodies, softly prowls the brushed-earth floor, the dark maze of the hut. Her wedding ring tings against the water dish, a knee creaks as she squats. A sloshing upward and fainter liquid pattering. Burning in the dark, his eyes feel they must be lighting up the room. His breaths whistle in his nose. It’s so quiet the towel rasps against her thighs; she must hear his raw eyes blinking. But she dries herself, then silence. For minutes she’s invisible, her outline fading in darkness, then she’s standing moonlit, motionless, at the window, staring out into the night. The layers of dark mystery now visible and triangle black on black. And then she starts suddenly – Ohh! – at something out there. Something looking in at her.

  Her murmur brings a rattling snore from whatsis-name. His breath overtakes all air within the hut, his inside gases and sour skin a cloud from wall to roof to floor. Same age as me give or take a couple of years.

  Always managing to flash it somehow. Sisters try to turn away, leave the room, but he’s onto that. Oh, Kate, Maggie, pass Daddy that towel/vest/shirt/boot/pair of long johns. Pardon old John Thomas, mind of his own, likes to see the light of day now and again. Don’t look at me like that, all churchy, we’re family now.

  She’s sluiced you away, boyo! Wiped away your scum.

  A big owl gave me a fright last night, she says next morning. Over three feet tall, must be one of those they call a Powerful Owl that can take a cat. It looked in at me and said Woo-hoo.

  Woo~hoo! he says, grabbing out for her in front of us. Woo~hoo!

  I’M IN a corner in O’Connell’s playing dominoes with Joe and drinking bottled bitter on a gritty afternoon. King weaves up, slaps my back and edges his face into my air. His beard’s as neatly tended as a Malvern lawyer’s hedge. Flour still in his fingernails and arm hairs. A yeasty smell older than his age. New brandy on his yeasty breath. I hate to look that close at any man’s mouth – lips, teeth and coated tongue. The last thing I want to know is a man’s gizzard secrets.

  ‘You never come home,’ he grizzles like a huffy aunt. ‘You never look me up when you’re in town.’ He’d thought we could be mates now we’re related, work some land together, maybe pan a bit of gold like we did that time at Bullock Creek, sell a few horses. He’s oven-crazy, sick of the hours in Rass-mussen’s bakery, wants the freedom of the outside life again. I don’t know whether he’s going to sing a ballad or burst into tears.

  ‘Important game in progress,’ I say.

  ‘I gave you those steers once I pinched at Blind Man’s Gully,’ he goes on. ‘Called off Detective Ward when he came sniffing round with good bribes to get something fishy on you.’ Then he peevishly changes tack. ‘I hear you’re hitting the grog. Looks like it from your face; anyway, your mother’s in a state.’

  I swallow a mouthful of ale and turn aside and George M. King yells, ‘I’m talking to you!’ and backhands the dominoes to the floor. So I swing back with my half-full bottle against his jaw just before his full one arcs around and clubs my ear. As we’re thrashing on the ground, Joe’s on his knees picking up the dominoes from under us, dusting them off and carefully placing them down, frowning with a watchmaker’s precise intent as he tries to remember the order of play.

  ‘These are nice bone ones, ivory or whalesteeth or something similar,’ Joe says. ‘And I had a natural then, so one of you bastards owes me two pounds ten.’

  Sent my stepfather home to Eleven Mile Creek unconscious on his horse, strapped on face to arse to make the point. My head still ringing from his bottle blow, my stomach mainly squeamish with what my mother’ll think, I pulled his baker’s hat down on him tight against the wind and gave the horse a whack so it wouldn’t stop until it reached her, or at least the watch-peacock.

  Impossible to tell her of the tart her husband’s baking, the assistant pastrycook, the skinny, one-armed girl that lost it above the elbow in the Wangaratta bridge collapse. That I was just counting on a free warm poppyseed loaf when I dropped in at five that morning in that hungover month and heard a familiar accented night-time grunting.

  In puffs of flour George King’s doughy backside bucked over the blackbutt rolling bench. Amid this dusty flurry her ghostly stick legs angled out. My stepfather couldn’t see the intruder but she did. But she held me with her stare, eyes like a serious clown’s in the floured face, and said not a thing. Somehow made me someone else, something between witness and accomplice. This broken biscuit just stared at me in silence and clasped him tighter to her with her defiant stump.

  ALWAYS ENVIED steady Joe’s calmness with the dominoes.

  Another widow’s boy, Joe comes and goes around the countryside, gives his girlfriends baby birds and melts their hearts. Comes from the Woolshed district where Reedy Creek runs down to Wangaratta just north of Beechworth. Grew up on a half-acre clearing, up against a steep flank of hills. The reason he’s footloose was feeling hemmed in by this escarpment as a boy. His dad Pat died when he was thirteen. Four girls and two boys. Nice-looking family.

  Joe brings the barmaids poddy lambs and calves he’s borrowed from some farmer, and stays the night. He’s the one made up the Kelly Song and over a glass of Hennessy sings it sweetly in the back bars after closing time.

  See yonder ride four troopers –

  One kiss before we part.

  Now haste and join your comrades:

  Dan, Joe Byrne and Stevie Hart.

  He gave Maggie, the barmaid at the Commercial Hotel at Beechworth, a baby curlew. She fed it bread and mincemeat of a morning but it didn’t thrive. So Joe would leave our hideout every night to bring it insects and feed it by moonlight like its mother. When he’d arrive he’d sidle up and softly call Kerloo! One palm nestling the feeding bird, the other a Hennessy three-star.

  She only asks me one thing, he says of Maggie. Whose horse have you got tonight? Just one of Hare’s, I say. Behind
the pub in her bedroom made of slabs and lined with paper and hessian against the cold he and the bird would snuggle down and say Ker-loo! Revolver nestling in his boot, Joe a night bird too.

  What else? To keep so steady and balanced Joe wears on his right hand a topaz ring he took from Scanlon’s dead finger, and on his left a gold ring with a white seal from a favourite girl. My calm friend Joe keeps a prayer book in one pocket of his jacket and in the other some .45 bullets and a brown-paper packet marked Poison.

  STEVE’S SLOWLY shuffling Dan’s playing cards. Entertaining old Cherry and his cronies. When he flicks them like that the showgirl seems to be shedding her clothes. Comes out from behind that cheeky parasol, bending and beguiling in her whalebone and frillies.

  Good poker cards. Optimistic new players always concentrating on the showgirl on the back of your hand instead of the front of their own. Takes a few games before they realise she’s mostly so creased and stained with dirt and cave mud they’re lucky to even make out her head.

  Steve’s caught me looking at my watch again. He’s been sulking since Jerilderie, since I made him give back the watch he’d lifted from some clergyman.

  No more watches.

  That can’t be the time. Two o’clock. Well into Monday!

  Come and see the lion I captured (I’ll say to Jane). PREY CAPTURES LION – there’s a heading for the Argus.

  You wouldn’t know there was a lion in there? Breathe deeply. Now? Look into the gloom. In that corner – yes, a female. An old lioness. Feel that meaty heat and breath. Those snores are dreams of instinct, memories of cubs grown up or dead, of ancestors killing unknown straight-up things like us.

  Do you do this? Sometimes out in the bush, in head-high scrub, I imagine I’m in Africa, hunted by yellow hidden eyes and silent paws. Jaws slobber at my possibilities. What am I, a pale sort of buck, a thin gorilla, a vertical pig? I’m a curious and dangerous smell, sweet and stale at once, a jagged mystery of an outline, but obviously a walking meal.

  When a male lion takes over a new pride he kills the cubs of the male before him.

  That’s how animals see things. Wish I had horns sometimes, sharp hoofs, eyes in the back of my head. Read in a geography book back at the Avenel Common School where the natives of India wear masks behind their heads, big painted eyes facing to the rear. Tigers creeping up on them see these eyes, think they’ve been spotted and shy off. That’s the theory anyway – I’d like to see the figures on backwards-facing tiger dinners.

  Got it wrong. I’m one of them. An animal anticipating the hunter’s bullet any day and anywhere. Only four men in the country – in the whole Empire – that any citizen’s allowed to kill, no questions asked. Guess who? Open season on Ned and Dan, Joe and Steve, and the biggest reward yet offered in the world. It’s up to eight thousand pounds.

  The Queen said so. Regina versus Us.

  SEE THIS ball of lion hair. This cat is rubbing itself to death. It can’t live with wanting us so much.

  You can plait it, make a keepsake bracelet of it, Jane.

  Speaking of Africa, that booking on the ship to Cape Town. The tickets even paid for. Letting it sail from Melbourne without us. Crazy.

  – That springy rise and fall of her …

  Has anyone seen Curnow? Where’s he gone? Bloody schoolteachers!

  Third night without sleep. I’m a little dizzy. What’s this on my hand? Bloody mosquito.

  Curnow’s gone.

  This is one trick we’ve got up our sleeves. Armour!

  What do you think? A surprise for Hare? Well, we tried both India rubber and ordinary sheet iron before I decided on plough mouldboards. Dressed a tree stump in a vest of India rubber, fired a Winchester at it from twenty yards. Did it pierce the vest? Yes, both sides, and the stump right through as well.

  Went through the sheet iron too. Only the front of it and six inches into the stump, but far enough to kill you twice.

  Lennon the blacksmith made the jackets from iron cultivators. My sisters sewed the padding. Tested with all weapons and bulletproof at ten yards. Designed to protect the head, body, upper legs and thighs. And of course the family jewels. Too heavy for any police bullets to get near us. My armour weighs ninety pounds, the headpiece alone twenty-five pounds.

  Hare won’t be able to touch us.

  What?

  The terrifying absence of a whistle.

  Jane hears a noise like a train steaming into a station. Ann Jones hears the squeal of wheels braking. Dan and Steve hear the clatter of horses being unloaded and men’s voices and running feet and come running themselves, spilling their drinks. Half the bar suddenly saying they heard something. But no one heard a train whistle, a warning.

  No whistle!

  Joe says, ‘Curnow stopped the train.’ And while they go to put on their armour Bracken unlocks the parlour door and escapes to the station.

  Joe says, ‘Bracken’s escaped.’

  Everyone hears the noise of the first of them making their way to the pub, the scrambling, crouching running, the scattering, the urgent low voices, sharp erratic hoofbeats. Rifle sounds.

  Everyone hears the silence.

  He says, hears himself say, ‘Put out the lights.’ What he’s been waiting for, wanting to happen.

  Then it starts.

  Considering the size and speed of the target, it’s a lucky shot someone potting the monkey in the first volley. But this is chaos. ‘The monkey’s shot,’ Joe announces, dragging on his armour. He’s unheeding of the bullets spraying through the weatherboards, shattering the windows, sending shards and splinters flying.

  The monkey bares its eyeteeth in a spitting screech, then claws and gnaws a frenzied scratching, searching its belly for this demon flea. ‘Someone better tell Orlando,’ Joe says, as it performs a last desperate backward-somersault onto the rump of some phantom circus pony and rides into oblivion or maybe Africa.

  Bottles ping and smash. Dan and Steve clank together up the corridor through the gloom, police bullets sparking and humming off their armour. They look around. They pull up the bar counter and partitions and barricade the walls with the flimsy furniture. As he adjusts his armour straps Joe softly curses various police by name.

  Lying on their faces in the front room, thirty or forty people. The women screaming and pressing into the floorboards, the children sobbing, the men crying out to the police to stop firing, for God’s sake. Some pray, or vomit up the weekend’s booze, or both. In the corner under the dartboard, wrist still connected to his monkey’s chain, Orlando lies snoring on his back. Some panicky farmer’s suggesting calling on the police to hold their fire and then all rushing out the door. Some labourer yells that if someone will only give him a gun he’ll fucking shoot the lot of them.

  Joe says to them all, ‘You’re better off where you are,’ and fires nonchalantly through the window at a glimpse of bearded face.

  A woman shaking Orlando awake sees his snoring is really the gurgling effect of the bullet that passed neatly through his eye.

  Bleeding from the mouth, Johnny Jones is moaning in the back room with a bullet through his belly. Ann Jones is wailing and begging nearby men to help her shift her son, but no one is keen to move. At last her roustabout, old Martin Cherry, rises from the floor and they drag the boy under the bar.

  There’s a towel on the bar for soaking up keg slops. Cherry reaches up for it, to make a pillow for the boy’s head, and in stretching embraces a hot ricocheting bullet.

  The police keep up the tempo of firing from two sides, bullets crossing in the corridor, bullets cat’s-cradling and spinning so the hallway’s a buzzing grid.

  Jane appears in the front parlour holding a candle, her brother’s blood on her. ‘All women and children come out with me.’ She leads a large party out the back door towards the railway gatehouse.

  A voice calls from a drain beside the road, ‘Who’s coming there?’

  ‘Women and children,’ Jane yells. From the drain a burst of shots passes their heads
and they break and run for their lives back to the pub.

  They run along the verandah and throw themselves into the parlour again as a shot hits the clock on the mantelpiece and sets it striking. It bongs sixty or seventy times before another bullet sends it exploding and uncoiling to the floor and, after it, Cherry’s taciturn old cockatoo in its cage.

  Over the floorboards mingled fluids trickling now – booze, urine, vomit, human and monkey blood. Every so often Dan or Steve moves to a door or window or into the open air to fire randomly, but mostly they stand in the passage or keep to the room they use as an armoury. Inside their armour they look small and aimless. They’re calling out for him.

  This is when a bullet enters Jane sideways through the stomach. She jolts, tilts over gracefully on her other side, meets all life’s detritus at once, cheek resting in the slops, the dust, the butts, the glass.

  Across the paddock, from the shadows behind the big tree stump beyond the lion’s wagon, two rockets spurt up – one bright, one faint. The signal. Now we’ll see.

  HE MUST get through the cordon now and meet them.

  He hadn’t realised the armour would slow things down so much.

  He arrived opposite the station as the last police were pouring off the train. Six Aborigines smoking pipes – the blacktrackers – sidled out of the rear goods van and assembled on the platform in front of a white man in a pith helmet. Just another tree trunk, invisible in the dark, he froze there in front of them until they sloped off. Then an armour bolt wouldn’t fit into its bloody slot. Jesus. By the time he’d adjusted it the police were firing into the inn. The screaming started. He was halfway back when he got a stray bullet in the foot, another in the left arm.