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  Eventually, Blackie caught his breath, and recovered just long enough to recognise that the other men remained clueless to what had him in a fit of laughter. Blackie roared again, slapping the seat with his hand. Seeing this, the other men nervously joined in. Just a kind of giggle at first, but then the stupidity of the moment had them full tilt. They laughed all the way into Main Street.

  The street was empty of people. Dust blew against the panes of glass, scratching away at telegraph poles and paper posters. The whole thing looked like a scene from a modern-day spaghetti Western – all it needed to complete the picture, was the whistling overture from Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

  When Blackie told Carlos to park the car, the mood changed to a deeper thing. He gave the street a quick look over, checking out who was who, and where whoever they were, were. He scanned the street looking for people in blue, remembering the cops back in Katoomba doing the same thing. He gave Rips a quick glance and raised an eyebrow in question to check if he had noticed anyone of suspicion that might be the law. Rips returned the look and, seemingly satisfied that he couldn’t spy any police either, smiled a crooked smile. Without a word being spoken between the two, Blackie opened the door, and stepped out onto the street, feeling strong, fearless, and frightfully fucken lucky.

  On the corner of Main Street and Talbragar, a singer played tambourine while the Salvation Army band played ‘Life in a Northern Town’.

  On the lookout for easy meat, Carlos whispered to Rips as they neared the entrance of the pub, ‘Hey, this looks right, Rips? Whaddya reckon? We score here for sure, brother!’

  Blackie knew his comment was an attempt to hide his own deviance by coaxing Rips into it.

  Small groups and couples stood leaning on the pub wall with their heads turned towards the inside, attempting to keep their talk secret. Their eyes flashed bright, quick as black cats, as Blackie’s group passed. But the Dubbo crowd did not say ‘g’day’ or make any attempt at being friendly.

  As Blackie pushed the heavy doors apart, the smell of stinking sweat and dirty people hit him like a punch in the face. The smell stung his eyes.

  ‘Faaarrrk me!’ Fingers exclaimed as the full smell of the stinking bar room hit him.

  Blackie looked over his shoulder to Fingers and laughed.

  As they walked into the bar, Blackie saw in a darkened corner four young guys deeply involved in young guys’ business. They stood with their pants hanging down around their arses, wearing hoodies, trying to look dark and dangerous – trying to look gangsta style. Blackie gave them a nod and a smile of hello, remembering that everyone was young once, but they just looked, then looked away from him without a smile. Laughing at them, he softly whispered: ‘Amateurs!’

  To their right, a young woman, who looked to be little more than sixteen years old, sat breastfeeding her baby. Between puffs of her cigarette, and as drunks staggered round her, and despite a singer singing ‘The Last Cheater’s Waltz’, she quietly sang to her baby – ‘You’re my little Aborigineeeee.’

  Walking through the crowd, Carlos’ eyes were everywhere and although there seemed to be standing room only, his keen eyes spotted a table near a window that’d give them perfect view of the street, and their car. ‘Here boys!’ he said.

  As he went to sit, Carlos looked at the young Koori woman feeding her baby. ‘See the size of her tit, man,’ he whispered to Rips.

  Rips was looking at the young mother too and nodding his head as a way of hello, but making no effort to make eye contact with her, in case it invited conversation or fight. Like Blackie he seemed to know that if she was out tonight, she must be really desperate. It was one of those nights. One of those crazy old nights that the men walked straight into, face-first.

  ‘You’re a good’n’alright, you cringer, Carlos … See, Rips? Who said he was no good, Rips?’ Blackie said, referring to Carlos.

  Before Rips could respond, Carlos started begging Blackie. ‘Pleeease! Don’t call me that, Blackie! I don’t want all these fellas thinkin I’m easy or somefin.’

  Blackie had caught the whisper and seen the look Carlos made concerning the young Koori woman and scoffed, ‘Cheap, easy and dirty, you Carlos … You fucker.’

  Rips was oblivious. He let out a big cooee to inform all and sundry that he was back in town, and ready for fun.

  Blackie looked at Rips and smiled and said to Rips, ‘So much for keepin our heads down, ya silly bastard!’

  There’s comfort in a crowd, and Blackie knew that he had the collective weight of other blacks in the bar. Should coppers try to take him while there, they would have to face the crowd also. If they wanted to throw their weight around inside that stinking pub, they’d better put their boxing gloves on and be prepared to fight. So in the meantime, Blackie felt safe. Seated at the table, Rips stuck his hairy paw deep into his jeans pocket and withdrew it with two fifties, a ten and a few twenty-dollar notes.

  ‘Hey, you fullas! Look what old Rips got! Where the fuck did dis come from?’ he asked his mates.

  Blackie was fast out of the blocks, replied, ‘That’s my money, bud. I stuck it in ya jeans back dere, past Penrith somewhere, cause me jeans got holes in ’em! See?’

  Blackie turned his jeans pockets inside out and sure enough, they were like the way he felt – ripped and torn.

  ‘Ahh! Fuck! Tort I was rich dere for minute, bud. La, la, let me shout youse all a drink, anyway!’ he laughed. And before Blackie could stop him, Rips dragged Carlos out of his seat, and together they were off to the bar, full of hope and happiness.

  Blackie laughed at his old mate, but watched him closely as he made his way to the bar, just in case Rips thought of making a sly detour towards the poker machine room. Blackie hated the misery that came from being broke all the time, and he hated the poker machines. Blackie looked at Fingers and said, ‘Watch old mate there, bud … he’s jest likely go spend the lot on the pokies before ya git up to do a piss. Bad gambler, that fulla mate.’

  Fingers nodded, agreeing in the moment that he’d keep the thought in mind.

  ‘Seem ta remember you useda like ’em too, hey Black? What happened?’ Fingers asked.

  ‘Jest got sicka givin all me dough to them hollo-neck bastards and never gittin anything back, that’s all. Anyway, my old friend, what you been up to? Woz Dubbo like these days? Still the same old shithole as always?’ Blackie asked, swaying unsteadily in his chair as the sound of music roared again.

  He reached for the pack of cigarettes on the table and slipped, knocking the big glass ashtray to the floor. He recovered it and returned to his seat, let out a low growl and drew a deep breath of the smoke-filled air.

  ‘Ya right, bro?’ Fingers asked, reaching and laying a reassuring hand on Blackie’s.

  ‘Yeah, it’s still the same shithole, still pushin blacks around. Still too many cops pushin their weight … All bout small business here, Black,’ Fingers answered.

  ‘Yeah, figured,’ was Blackie’s reply.

  Blackie blinked and shook his head. He caught sight of the worried look on Fingers’ face, and thought he could see Carlos in the distance with his hands full of drinks.

  ‘Course I’m fucken right! You know me, brother! Blackfullas, always alright!’ he laughed.

  ‘Hey, who useda always say that? “I’m always right!” … JK, thas right …? Remember him Fingers, JK? He was a funny one, that fulla, hey?’ Blackie went on.

  JK the fighter, Blackie’s uncle, always at war with the law and never a man to give in in a fight. JK would go down swinging. Two things he could do well was fight, and drink. And, Blackie missed him.

  Blackie looked around the bar room. He looked from table to table and from the floor to the ceiling, at nothing in particular.

  ‘Ya know,’ he declared. ‘I hate the smell in here … But I love the lights – I love the shadows.’ He looked from corner to dark
corner, taking in the shapes and things that hung around like bloodstains on a boxer’s towel.

  ‘Why ya say that, Black?’ Fingers replied.

  Blackie thought of shitty things he’d done – broken promises, lies he’d told, letters he’d never replied to. Thought of his chances and things he had pissed away into Nothing-Ville.

  Fingers was remembering JK and roused on Blackie, saying, ‘Yeah. Course I remember JK. He stayed at our place often enough. What’s the matter with you? You gone mad, or what?’

  Blackie laughed and shook his head. ‘Sorry man, I’m wrecked, bruz. Off me head, man.’

  Fingers scratched and said, ‘I seen the old fulla a couple a months ago. He came through here with one of his sons – Robert, I think … Was takin him down to Bathurst for court, or something. Said he was shacked up with a woman from Wilcannia, livin somewhere. Fucked if I know.’

  ‘No shit hey?’ Blackie declared. ‘Bastard still kickin? Well, I’ll be … Coulda swore he woulda met his maker by this time …’

  Settling into a casual yarn, Blackie told Fingers about the swans fighting back at Katoomba.

  ‘Hope we don’t git into a blue here, mate,’ Fingers said quietly.

  Fingers knew that Blackie was off his head before they walked in. He did not need Blackie to tell him how things were. Fingers knew from the staggering and the scattering of Blackie that he was on a bender.

  They kept the conversation on the light side, reminiscing for a short while, just filling in time until Rips and Carlos returned.

  ‘Know what the whitefullas call that place – Wilcannia?’ Blackie laughed. ‘They say, Will-Kill-Ya! Hope old JK don’t kill anyone down that way.’

  Fingers failed to see what was funny about that. He’d been clipped once before by a Koori bloke from Wilcannia, thus he did not join in the laughter.

  Blackie was letting his mind relax and recalled the time Fingers and Dorothy first met in Sydney. ‘Hey bud, remember that weekend on the big Knockout in Sydney? The year they split it tween Mascot and Marrickville?’ he asked.

  Fingers smiled at Blackie. Fingers had been through this routine with Blackie before and he knew what was coming next. Blackie would often bring up the funny side of the lovemaking antics of Fingers and Dorothy, just for a laugh, whenever they got together. But Fingers played along.

  ‘Naa, Blackie. What happened?’ Fingers lied.

  ‘That was a wild weekend, that one, Fingers – when big Dot first got with you. “Hey white boy! Come here … I’m ‘Dot with the lot’ … And you jest what I been lookin for!”’ Blackie said, mimicking Dot.

  Blackie laughed, and Fingers cringed. Fingers rolled his eyes and tried to look away. But Blackie just laughed louder at seeing Fingers squirm.

  What had happened was that, during that weekend in Sydney, Fingers met Dot, and while people may have been sleepless in Seattle, in Redfern, Fingers – the thin man, and Dot – the big woman, tried fucking each other on the back seat of her red Holden Commodore. Fingers’ lily-white arse was moving so fast in the urgent struggle for sexual relief that for a short while there, Blackie gave him the nickname ‘The Blur’.

  ‘Eleven years ago, Blackie. Our eldest boy was conceived in that back seat of the old car, that weekend. Eleven years ago. And … you went round tellin everybody ta call me “The Blur”, ya bastard! Didn’t ya, hey?’ Fingers laughed.

  In equal good humour, Blackie denied the accusation as quickly as it was said, but both knew it was the Blackman who’d spread the yarn of ‘Dot with the lot’ and ‘The Blur’.

  ‘Tell ya what old mate, if I didn’t like ya, I’d make a movie about ya and me cousin and call it that … “True Life Adventures of ‘Dot with the Lot’ versus ‘The Kiwi Wonder – The Blur’”! Or “Blurring”!’ Blackie laughed.

  Rips and Carlos returned to the table with a round of beers. Rips had a Koori woman with him who walked a couple of steps behind the two men.

  Rips had a peculiar inquiring look upon his face.

  ‘Ya, ya fucken liar, Blackie!’ were the first words he spoke.

  Blackie didn’t even bother to look up at him, but instead gave a broad grin and shook his head as he said, ‘Bloody took ya long nuff ta work it out didn’t it, ya big Murri?’

  Blackie took a long swig of the cold beer.

  ‘What’s goin on?’ Fingers inquired, looking confused.

  Rips took control and invited the woman to join them as everybody moved to make space for her at the table. As Rips reached for a cigarette for himself, then offered the woman a smoke, he began to explain.

  ‘Daz not your money, Blackie, ya big gee-wiz! Jest membered, I, I, I got fucken paid ’fore we … strike me dead, Fingers, ah! Ya gotta watch this one … He, he, he’d fucken tell ya water run uphill!’

  Blackie knew that Rips would have figured the truth out, sooner or later, and that it was only a joke that Blackie’d played.

  ‘Anyway bud … how bout a loan till I git paid hey? Ya must have a sly fifty there for your old mate Blackie, ay? Seein that you the big captain,’ Blackie said, laughing.

  ‘Captain fucken Cook! Fuck you. But, never mind bout dat now,’ Rips said, changing the subject. He half turned to the woman and said, ‘Wanna inna-duce you all to diz lubly lady, ’ere,’ deliberately over-exaggerating the woman’s importance in a gesture of good humour and respect. Trying to sound like he was a host on a crummy television game show he said:

  ‘Let me inna-duce youse to dis ’ere ravin beauty. She’s known throughout the west as Darlin Riba Queen! That’s right folks – don’t muck round with her, cause she’s all the way from dat beautiful town-a Bourke … crows fly backwards – all dat shit. Where men are men, and sheep are scarce cause all Blackie’s mob ate ’em out. Name’s Tegan and she comes with a reputation as a singer and a dancer. And she’s best-lookin woman ’ere, thas for sure!’ he said, smiling.

  He pretended to joke with her by burying his face into the crook of her neck, being sure that he was taking in a sly feel of her curves. She felt his moves, but didn’t push him away.

  They all erupted in rowdy laughter at Rips.

  ‘You’re a spinner!’ she roused.

  She slapped him on the arm.

  He pretended that it hurt and that he was wounded. Then, to over-emphasise chivalry, he drew her chair out and assisted her to sit, trying to be Prince Charming.

  ‘See it’s true, bud …’ Rips said to Blackie. ‘A rose can bloom in the desert.’

  But Tegan did not pay attention to Rips’ comment. She was more interested in Blackie. She thought she recognised his face, but was not certain. She wondered if he was her cousin. ‘Ya name’s Blackie, tain’t it?’ she asked him.

  Blackie watched her relax into a chair opposite himself, wondering who she was.

  He stared at her in an attempt that he might recognise a familiar family trait of one of his countrymen. But there was nothing there that he could place her with. And with that, he had no idea if she was a relative of his, or not.

  Having been away from home for such a long time, he was not sure as to who were friends or relations or enemies anymore. Best, he thought, was to respect and make friends with her, and to treat her as if she was a relative. Regardless, he knew that come tomorrow night, everyone in the old, dusty former frontier town of Bourke would know that he was in Dubbo in a sad and sorry state wrecked from drugs and alcohol.

  Bourke, the dusty town, is filled with mischief and gossip and people just love to carry bad news about someone they know. His memories of the last time he was in Bourke were of a town that was set against him, and a town where the local cops bashed him, charged him and gaoled him.

  He remembered being dragged from the courthouse in cuffs back to the watch house across the road. He remembered the sticking pissy smell of the cell they placed him in. ‘Fuck Bourke,’ he told himself, getting carrie
d away in memories. And, he remembered the truck that transported him and four other black men later that same day away from Bourke and on to the ‘Big House’ at Bathurst for another laggin.

  Blackie was having difficulty in staying focused and was abruptly brought back into consciousness from Rips asking him ‘if he was right?’

  ‘Course I’m right, Rips … Whatcha fucken talkin bout?’ Blackie joked.

  Blackie’s light-hearted reply had everybody at the table less tense than they had been the minute before.

  The young woman began again telling Blackie that ‘dey all still talkin bout you back ’ome’.

  ‘Fuck ’em!’ he replied, shrugging his shoulders and shutting down the topic.

  The woman acknowledged that he would not be drawn into a longer conversation about his identity or circumstances to her there at that moment by a nod of her head. As she lit a cigarette, Blackie asked, ‘Who’s your mob, sis?’

  Chit-chat followed, but Blackie could hardly hear above the noise in the bar anything that she told him. He smiled and took cues from her body language the best he could rather than repeating, ‘What’d ya say?’

  Back in Bourke, the talk was that Blackie was responsible for a firebomb attack on the cop-shop, and that he had snuck out of town before the Riot Squad turned up. Rumours flew as cops belted black boys and black men they came across in a two-day splurge of unrelenting violence to teach the blacks another lesson of Who’s The Boss. The same lesson the bastards have been trying to teach the blackfullas ever since they arrived here in Australia.

  Blackie swore he wasn’t there, that it wasn’t him that threw the bottle.

  But no one believed him.

  He knew who did the deed, but was never gonna be a give-up on anyone he knew. He was thought of as being the type to carry out such a thing.

  To the black folk, he was just another crazy nigga, and to the white people, he looked like he’d fit the bill in carrying out such an attack. The blackfullas might well have forgiven him for the attack on their mob by the police if he was there to take his punishment like the rest of the innocent when the time came for white payback. Because of all their lies and innuendos, he’d become a wanted man by the law, and an unwanted man amongst his own mob in the same moment.