Red Dog: True Blue

The dirty old Cessna came down on the landing strip, and bounced. The pilot whooped, and took the aircraft up into the air again. He glanced at the pale little boy beside him, and said, ‘Don’t be a worry-wart, mate, it’s just for fun. You don’t get many laughs out here unless you find ’em yourself.’

As the plane banked round for another run, Mick looked out in wonder at the land beneath him. It consisted of brown grass, twisted trees, red rocks and red earth, and pretty much not anything else as far as the eye could see, unless you counted the sea, which sparkled in the distance like a tray of diamonds.

‘Everything’s red,’ said Mick.

‘I’ve brought you to Mars, mate. Thought you’d like some space travel.’

‘You can’t get to Mars in an aeroplane,’ Mick told him, more confidently than he really felt.

‘Jeez, you’re a sharp one. Might as well be on Mars, though. This is the Pilbara. You’ve got to be barmy as a bandicoot to live out here. Even the roos and dingos are barmy. Give me Margaret River any day. It’s lovely down in Albany. It’s stiff bickies you’ve got to live up here.’

‘Port Hedland looked nice,’ said Mick.

‘Well, it is. Got the best fish and chips in the world. Great place if you like fishing. Caught a shark there once, with a roo steak.’

The plane came down again, and Mick tried not to be frightened. It was scary to see the ground rushing up like that; the plane waggled from side to side as the earth rushed up to meet them, and the thump of landing made his stomach seem to jump up into his throat. He gripped the side of his seat, his knuckles white. After they had slewed to a halt, they sat there for a while until the cloud of red dust that had enveloped them had been given time to disperse. It suddenly seemed very hot in the cockpit.

When the pilot opened the door and told him to clamber out, the heat overcame the boy like a blast from hell. Mick did not know how to react. He had never felt a heat so dense, as if it were made of metal. ‘Not so hot today,’ the pilot said. ‘You’re lucky. Sometimes it’s like a bloody furnace.’

Mick stood on the shimmering earth, and the pilot tossed his blue suitcase down to him, saying, ‘Here, mate, catch!’ It wasn’t a big case, but it was crammed with almost everything that Mick owned, and he fell backwards as it hit his chest.

‘Sorry, mate,’ said the pilot, as Mick stood up and looked dumbly at the red dust that covered his hands and clothes. ‘Better get used to it.’

The pilot came down, and stood against the tailplane, calling over his shoulder, ‘’Scuse me, mate, just got to shake hands with the unemployed.’

Mick was from a polite family in Sydney, and it filled him with wonder that someone would actually wee in public without embarrassment. He was busting himself, but he was going to wait until the aircraft had gone. When he grew older, and told foreigners that he came from Sydney, he’d add, ‘But Sydney isn’t really Australia.’ This was something he was just beginning to learn as he stood out there in the desert, a city boy of eleven years who felt as if he had lost everything.

The pilot finished, buttoned himself up, and said cheerfully, ‘No one to meet you. That’s a shame. Don’t worry, someone’ll be along in two shakes. I’ll leave you a bottle of water. And you can have my sandwiches. Bloody Vegemite and cucumber. She knows I don’t like it.’

‘Why don’t you just make your own sandwiches then?’ asked Mick sensibly, but the pilot just looked at him as if he was mad, and replied, ‘Take my advice, mate, don’t get married. You’re better off with a dog, and that’s the truth.’

Mick sat on his suitcase and watched the plane take off in another plume of dust, and then disappear, the sun glinting on its wings despite its shabbiness. It banked as it turned back towards Port Hedland, waggling its wings in friendly farewell. Mick had liked that strange, humorous, rough-hewn pilot, and the thought struck him that maybe when he grew up he could be a bush pilot too, or a flying doctor.

The noise of the engine faded out in the distance, and Mick realised that he was completely alone. It was slightly strange not to be feeling the vibration and noise of the plane any more. The heat was stunning, and there was nothing he could do but sit there and wait, fighting back the panic and horror of being alone in this vast alien place of spinifex and red-hot rock. He opened his suitcase and took out a shirt to put on his head, because he could feel the sun burning his hair off and parching the skin of his face and lips, and reseated himself on the case. He noticed a ta-ta lizard, nearby, watching him with detachment as it raised one foot then another to dispel the heat. It really did look as though it were waving goodbye.

Today had been the end of a long farewell. It was goodbye to Sydney, for one thing. There had been too many goodbyes. Just a few months ago his dad had died, and he still did not really know why or how. Nobody seemed to want to talk to him about it. They just said, ‘You’ve got to be a brave boy, and make sure your mum’s all right.’ He couldn’t think of his father as dead, not that tall strong man who used to bowl cricket balls at him, and hold him upside down over the garden pond, and show him how to use a sling so that he could play at David and Goliath by hurling pebbles at a Moreton Bay Pine, and told him absurd stories at night until he could keep his eyes open no longer, and would go to sleep laughing. Mick was still numb from it all, and hadn’t been able to cry, even in private. They hadn’t let him go to the funeral. He’d only been to visit the grave to take flowers to it, and it had given him nightmares afterwards as he imagined what his father might look like now, six feet under the ground.

It had been no use trying to be strong for his mother, because then, when her own father had died shortly after her husband, she’d cracked up altogether. She was ‘being looked after’, that’s what they told him. When he visited her in the home, she sat by the bed in her nightdress, with crooked lipstick, her hair dishevelled, staring past him through the window, without seeing the lorikeets in the trees or the mynah birds on the sill. When he tried to hug her, she did not react, and when he did as he was told, and kissed her hello and goodbye, her cheek felt cold, and too soft. ‘How’s Dad?’ she’d ask him, and he never knew what to say.

A kind nurse told him that his mother had gone on a sort of holiday, because of all the shock and grief, one dreadful thing after another. It wasn’t the kind of holiday where you pack your bags and drive up to Byron Bay, it was the kind where your mind closes down for a while. ‘Don’t worry, Mick,’ said the kind nurse, ‘she’ll come back. They nearly always do. Just give her a while, and she’ll be back. You’ll have masses of fun with your rellies out west, I know you will. It’ll be quite an adventure.’

This is why he’d flown to Perth in a beautiful big airliner, and finally arrived in the Pilbara in a scruffy Cessna, being looked after all the way by a string of kindly people who’d been detailed to take good care of him. He’d had a bucketload of chocolate bars and boiled sweets, and had only been worried or frightened at take-off and landing. He’d completely run out of interesting things to say about himself.

All this bore down on him as he sat and waited out in the wilderness, completely alone apart from the ta-ta lizard, hotter than he had ever imagined it was possible to be, still benumbed by the rapid changes that had overturned his life.

Mick wondered why his granpa had not come out to meet him. He must have heard the aircraft, surely? He wouldn’t just leave his grandson out here to bake in this furnace, would he? He couldn’t say he knew his dad’s father very well, because he only saw him once or twice a year at most, but he knew him well enough to know that he wasn’t irresponsible.

Mick felt like crying, but defeated the impulse. He’d become used to having to be strong. He sat on his case as slowly the heat began to drain from the air, and the sun descended in the west, out over the sea. He wondered if he would have to sleep outdoors, and whether dingos ever attacked humans any bigger than babies. There were many tales of dingos eating babies, but he’d never heard of them eating an eleven-year-old boy. He got up and began to search for rocks that were the right size for throwing, searching among the spinifex, and coming back with them and making a neat pile in front of his suitcase. He came upon the ancient skeleton of a red kangaroo, with morsels of skin still attached to the bones in places, and he wrenched off one of the femurs. It was a lovely, big, heavy bone, and when he sniffed at it, expecting to be disgusted, he found that it hardly smelled at all. All the stink had long been burned off by the sun.

He sat down on his suitcase again and took his pocket knife from his jacket. His father had given it to him the Christmas before he died, saying, ‘Here, son, you’re old enough for one of these now.’ He’d shown Mick how he should always cut away from himself in order to avoid a slip and a cut, and how to sharpen it to a razor’s edge, because a blunt knife is far more dangerous than a sharp one. Mick had whittled his dad a paper knife for opening envelopes, and given it to him on his birthday as a way of saying thank you. Now that he’d been entrusted with his own knife, he felt he’d reached a new stage in his maturity. His father had promised him an air rifle when he was thirteen, and that would have been the next stepping stone towards manhood.

Mick held the blade at ninety degrees to the kangaroo bone, and set about scraping off the dried pieces of skin. This had to be a good weapon for bashing dingos on the head, and it might come in useful afterwards too, such as to use as a priest if he ever caught a truly huge fish.

He was so preoccupied with his scraping that he did not hear the hoof steps behind him until the horse snorted, almost down his neck. He leapt to his feet from the surprise and shock, and the horse reared up in the air, his forelegs flailing, and whinnying so wildly that it almost sounded like a scream. Mick did not know afterwards whether he had been too frightened to run, or had instinctively known what was the right thing to do. He raised the femur above his head, and faced the horse.

The horse was coated in thick red dust, and was terribly big, as large as a hunter, and Mick could smell its hot dungy odour and grassy breath. It reared again, and then stood, pawing the ground as if it were about to attack him.

‘Good horse,’ said Mick. ‘Good horse. Steady, boy, steady.’ His parents had sometimes taken him riding out on tamed brumbies in the Blue Mountains, so he was not as frightened of horses as he might have been. Even so, he could feel his heart thumping in his chest.

The horse had one eye that was completely clouded over, and he cannot have seen anything at all out of it, apart from whether or not it was night or day, but the other eye was large, intelligent and clear. The horse whinnied, and Mick shook the bone at it. The horse lowered his head and went into a posture that was almost a crouch. Mick saw that its mane was horribly tangled.

A warm voice behind him said, ‘You riling up my horse, boy? Don’t you go whacking it with that bone, now.’

Mick’s grandfather was standing over him, shirt-sleeved, brawny-armed, broad-shouldered and sun-beaten, with a broad bush hat thrust down on his head. This was Ronald Carter, a determined cocky out in a place where no sensible farmer would ever have thought of having a farmstead. He put his hand on Mick’s shoulder and said, ‘Welcome to the Pilbara. Why on earth didn’t you come in after you landed?’

‘Come in, Granpa? Where?’

Ronald Carter gestured towards a low mound. ‘The bungalow’s just there. Over that bump. Don’t you remember? I thought you’d just duck up, and then I got tired of waiting, and came out to see what you were up to.’

‘How am I supposed to remember, Granpa? I was two when I was here the last time.’

‘Two? Blimey. You mean it was nine years ago? Sorry, son. I remember now, course you were, just a little ankle biter with a fat face and a gobful of cake. Must have lost track of the time. Goes faster and faster the older you get, and that’s a fact. What are all those stones for?’

‘Dingos,’ replied Mick. ‘In case I was here all night. Or forever.’

‘Blimey. You’re the duck’s nuts, you are. You’re just like your dad. No flies on you. Is that what the roo bone’s for?’

‘Yes, Granpa.’

‘We’d better get you a hat,’ said Ronald. ‘I’m pretty sure we’ve still got one of your dad’s from when he was your age. I’ll take a look. You can’t wear a shirt on your head. Folks’ll talk.’

The horse had wandered off, and Mick asked, ‘Why’s he like that?’

‘Willy? He was under a gum tree, got struck by lightning. He’s mad as a Pommy lord now. I just don’t have the heart to put him down. He’s supposed to be locked up in the paddock but he kicks down the fence, or jumps it. He’s a bloody Houdini. Do me a favour, will you?’

‘What, Granpa?’

‘Don’t ever let ’im out of the paddock, and if you see him out, come and tell me. That feller’s damned dangerous. Give him a chance and he goes out looking for a blue. Don’t know how you didn’t get kicked.’ Ronald picked up Mick’s suitcase and slung it across his chest so that it hung at the back of his left shoulder. ‘Home, James,’ he said. ‘Advance and be recognised. It’s beer o’clock, the sun’s goin’ down, and it’s time to bog in. Don’t forget your boomer bone.’

‘Did you ever get struck by lightning, Granpa?’

‘Me? No. I got mad without it. You have to be mad to live out here. Wouldn’t live anywhere else, though.’

At the top of the mound they stopped and watched the sun grow vast and crimson-orange as it slipped down.

‘Granma planted a garden,’ said Granpa, ‘and all that’s left now is the little orange tree. While you’re here it’s your job to water it, right? Not exactly hard yakka, but you might as well make yourself useful.’

Mick nodded, wondering why his grandad had mentioned the tree, and then he noticed that the sun had turned orange, and was disappearing with a final blaze at the crown. The stars suddenly became more visible.

As the temperature dipped, Ronald picked up the case, sighed, and said, ‘Doesn’t matter how many times I see it.