The sun struck down on him like a wall of scalding water. It shone quickly with full influence and he had positioned himself so that the slight shade of the post he was fastened to by his hands would lend downward his core from crotch to face though the remainder of him was discoloured red severely and all the blood had desiccated and fractured with pools of it on the red tough dirt looking black now and thus did the spots and stains on his clothes. the stark sharp clarity of her features, the apparition blue of planets in her eyes, tresses like tangled flames. They had beaten him with rifle butts all over and some had lashed him with bullwhips. He had felt the crack of fists on his head and the dull direct blunt of them into his torso and back. her perfumed creamy skin lends through with the pale rich blue of veins in her breasts and the underside of her forearms. He'd gotten some shots in too but he had no idea whether they were good or not. He was dragged feet first along the scarlet dusty ground with the flow of blood greatly smudged on the country scraped over and was sure some of his ribs were busted. Two men heaved him up on account of Smith giving them instructions to do so and they'd tied him to a hitching post by the wash troughs that they all used to bathe after a day with the cattle on account of the next set of orders. language that would quiet and lips that pluck fleshly and beam morning lucid radiance Smith had reviled him from the start for the reason that he'd not backed down to him when he was thrashing another boy on account of looking at his girl excessively. He scuffled Smith fiercely and opened his eye and Smith's old man owned the station and he was lucky they hadn't thrown him off at that time. Smith had never spoke to him since. Instead he had waited well for the time cause he knew he'd not step down to him and the time would come and it did. The indigenous boy had done no wrong but Smith had prejudice next to all the dark men and women even though he'd seen him taking an adolescent dark girl from behind in the hot stink of the horse stable knees in the dirt and hay and he had said nothing to anyone. He figured that wasn't his business. He knew of those arrangements all over the country. He had tried to reason with Smith saying the boy couldn't have been the one who'd taken the calf but his mind was made and he thought now that it may have been made that way all week. Smith was inebriated on whiskey with the others for the weekend and the cattle were well put away now and he'd seen this before and knew it wouldn't just end in the beating and death of the boy but that it had the potential for savagery like he'd known before. Awful scenes he'd been spectator to as a young man and he was still a young man and it couldn't have been the boy cause the boy was by him that morning straight shooting a pistol he had leant him time and again into the limestone rocks out the back of the place. When he took a view at the tracks himself it was clear that a man with boots had slaughtered it and taken it's hind legs and it was clear other's had been on watch but he'd been shut up during the stand-off by rifle butts to the stomach then whipped across the head the same and they all came at him in a mob and a hurry then and he just held his hands to his head and knees to his chest. Even after he was bloody and tied Smith had cracked him across the face once more, he heard him laugh and say something about his crack shot can't be helping his ass now and he just lay slumped in the scorching sun sweating and bleeding and breathing. They'd spat at him as they rode out together past him. Out to the aboriginal camp where all the hands slept and ate. They never went out there unless to maim or rape and usually did it much quieter than this but they were drunk. He'd been out there shooting roos with the hands many times. He'd shot dingoes and emus too. He hardly ever missed.
- He had come north this way after he'd lost his family in a bushfire that had killed hundreds. He lost them all and everything they had and after the memorials he just plain rode north along the coast and came across a sign saying the station was inland on a certain track about two hundred miles. He had lost his girl in the fire too. He had been riding days already and it took him days to get there. Through the red dirt and scrub. Olive and blonde and auburn bushland. Arid and burnt. Clearest night skies that stars shot across so frequent that it lost it's magic. His clothes like rags and hat so dusty, he shot what he could and drank at places he came across and once went three days with nothing to eat or drink finally coming to small billabong with roos in the shade of it's gum trees and he camped a day there and replenished with the horse watching the sunsets off a small cliff face down some and everything went scarlet and plum with the star downing like the sky had been cut and was haemorrhaging. He knew no God anymore. Not with what he had seen. There were no prayers when he lay down. He smoked meat for the ride on the fire and filled all the containers he had with water and was at the station in about another three days and was working the day after. He kept to himself and read his books he'd bought with him. Taught one younger man how to read for a time. He shot much and won a competition they held aiming at the horns on bull skull one night and the prize was a kiss from the prettiest girl there and she whispered to him and he met her there and didn't finish inside her cause she didn't want no infant. She said he was the most fine-looking man at the station and he liked her ample dark rippled curls and the way she tasted like milk when he kissed her. Inside her was like being tousled in gorgeous combustion and her tight struggle with him whenst she moaned and hushed brought him a rapturous ache unlike he had known. The dents they left in the firm damp of the earth consoled him something he could never really understand though the consolation made up for nothing. He never could fathom it, why she would drink his sap off his or her skin or fingers with her boiling tongue, why she spat the name of Smith into the skies just after. He knew she was Smith's girl and that this must stay only with them and he said you have my word and it went on amid them up to the day he was defeated. He was sure Smith knew not anything of it, he may have known she liked his looks some but the meetings he knew she would not speak a statement of. They never really spoke, just made it especially forceful downhill by the stream with damp space nearby and the dim reflecting into it ceaselessly. She washed in it afterward and he just made it on home. Smith had hated her attraction for him and the insolence he showed him that day in the scrap and killing the boy would hurt him deep and Smith knew this. Smith knew he was in well with the hands and that they liked him, that all the men spoke of it behind his back and found him not just a native lover but superior and straight and swift and he'd been in fights but given out two stern hidings plus having scored Smith's eye and they all knew he was the best shot at the station. Smith had seen him shooting with the boy in the morning.
- He followed the thin dim of the pole with the sun. He thought of screaming out to her but knew better and thus figured thoroughly on getting free and getting his rifle. lassitude in love by the shadow of lit wine afternoons. The intense heat and blood loss had left him feeling as if a flannel shirt were stuffed down his throat. His eyes stung with the glaring sunlight their whites feeling clammy and stuck. The left one was swelling partly shut and his exposed skin was searing raw mostly on his arms and neck and his chest where his shirt was torn. rainwater on her fulsome skin and dresses flowing and gathering while journeyed on steaming horses in the morning. He couldn't spit and was weary. sunbeams off the underside of her knee the very comparable streak that travelled into her thigh. He could see they'd started burning the campgrounds as the smoulder rose off into the sun miles off away down the plain. The sky was darkening with it and he could tell they'd burnt either side of the place to bottleneck them into the path of the horses. He knew the natives would not let the boy go and would fight and this would get them all slaughtered. He would die here himself he thought, the sun would pummel him into submission and they'd cut his head off and hack him into pieces when they got back all intoxicated and bloodied in frenzy. He stood up squinting. her delicate dense suction on my stomachs striation and chest and skeleton tracing my shiver with her flush lips following the line of her jawbone in the luminosity shooting through the blueness of windows from space and the ever whites of her rolling eyes. Groaning with pain. My left arm might be broken he acknowledged. He got to kicking that pole.
- With the initial swipe he could tell there was more of it above ground than below. He could tell this by way of the vibration that reverberated up the wood and left the thing shaking. The red dirt being packed so hard around it would help and he kicked at the top of it to get as much shake as achievable. Within a minute it was loose some. In two there were spaces either side of it in the ground. He sweating much and this was mixing with the parched and wet blood and dripping onto the soil looking like collected black oil. The kicking was awkward due to his hands being tied and more than once he went over and felt wounded seriously. The way he was tied was a loop done double over each hand and then hitched around the pole so as any struggling just made the hitch get tighter both on wrist and wood. It was undoable because they had made it so as he could not get to the place where the hitch could be undone. This was done by way of the length of rope between himself and the pole, it was a common rig on the station. He opted then to use his shoulder on the side opposite to that he thought were broken ribs and went to busting into it the dust dancing from under his boots scraping dry ground and being put into air and the smoke across the plain getting blacker which meant that houses and scrub were burning. He assessed his progress then, saw that there were two deep grooves either side of the pole and went to wangling it circular so as to get some more loose into it. He grabbed it with his tied hands and propped the dead thing against his shoulder lifting only gently and dropping it with a thud and he reasoned there was maybe half a metre of it under the dirt. He packed into it again with purpose and went for the lift with conviction, a strained intention, the arm that he guessed was broken busted then and he dropped it and fell against the ground spit leering out of his mouth in a painful horrid anguish. He had felt it click as the bone went. He clutched the limb to his side as he half rolled toward the sky taking the sun's brunt in his face and eyes. He lay beaten a minute. Tied and wrecked. Vomited some onto the dirt shoving his chin further earthward, the stubble of his cheek scratching the hard surface of this lonely planet. Sick drying instantly against the red, some running down the grooves he'd made, some assimilating with his clotted blood. The bone ached badly inside him. He had no choice. They would execute him. He fell to a standing position. Stood up with his knees warily to his feet all ragged. Took hold of the pole with the side of him containing broken ribs. Took hold with just one arm and that side. He drove with his legs hard and fast and it stuck on the other end that was nailed down about six feet away. He held it there the entire pole clear of the earth it was in and then drove again hearing the wood's quick crack and falter and he threw it away from the hole going to ground himself so that he was free and whole thing bust down the other end with the wood shot into pieces against the black of the sky across the plain. He lay just a moment in the serration of the sun, then up and ran to the stable immersing himself in water cooling and drinking and washing then getting those ropes off his good and fractured limb. The shade in the stable was like cold water itself and he looked out as he untied the rope, he peered through the harsh cut sunshine clarity seeing the terrible night of the thick sinister plumes sometimes seeing angry red orange licks of flame over the bushland of the plain. The contrast of dirty black and clear blue like a permanent smudge on a pretty whore's fresh cleaned dress. He made a sling for his arm from some old rein's looping them over his neck and then supporting his arm at the wrist. He realised as he went about this that the broken bone was in his barrel arm. He didn't have time to think about. He grabbed a dirty big-rimmed hat stained with cow blood and then went to his horse and spoke gently to it as he took it out and saddled it quickly. He threw water all over himself again, used the hat for this, spoke some more calm as he mounted and then blitzed out on horseback into the burn of the day and across to the sleeping quarters just in the distance. He was making for his rifle.
- Water and blood streamed down him and onto his horse as he roughly rode one handed to where his guns were placed. He swept off the still moving horse and bolted inside collecting his rifle and bullets and his pistol too. The same one the aboriginal boy had been shooting that morning. This was not lost on him. It was the reason he had grabbed it. That and that he figured he weren't coming back. He slung the rifle over his shoulder and stuck the pistol in the back of his pants then remounted. He tilted the hat more so as the block the sun fully from his eyes as now he rode west and straight into it. The water on him had all vanished and the caked stuck feeling of dried blood and layered sweat had all but left his skin. The star hammered down on him. He rode forth and past where he was tied and then further up to the main house and she was on the porch fanning herself and the sight of him scared her some cause he looked as if he had fought his way out of a grave. He halted and went to her but never left his sweating horse. What happened to you she asked, you know he said. I do not and it was possible she didn't as what had happened was out of vision from there, even if you don't you could work it out, he soaked up the sweat from his brow with his sleeve, you were against them she said, he nodded, eyes hidden with the brim of the hat, he spoke then, the boy did nothing, she knew he was he never much for words, she anticipated the quiet after his brief sentence, what are you doing now? Her question felt feeble, she knew what he was doing, I ain't coming back he said, he spat out saliva and blood, turned the horse to go and she spoke and he heard what she had said but didn't act as though he had, blankets he said, for the fire, and she went inside and came back with greying old woollen things and he thanked her and she replied will you come for me? He stared at her briefly, gave her his eyes for the first time, an expressionless sharp canvas, he then heeled the horse and swung it round, he didn't even look back at her, just rode into the white dot sun behind the pallid column of dark smoke. He rode swift with all he had left. He had to slow when he hit the heat of the fires. He hadn't felt much for anyone for a long time and he doubted he felt anything for her. He wrapped the blankets over him and cantered forward through floating embers the orange and black of hot coals, he covered his mouth with his hat. The fire had spread fast and would continue to do so until it burnt out. The path was wide and he knew he was safe. He had ridden like lightning down the one to his house much south of here and when he got there everything was gone in flames that seemed as high as the tallest trees he knew and he had no choice but to escape out of there or he would have gone the same way. That track was narrower than this. He saw no sense in him surviving when his father and mother and brother and sister and girl had burned. He had ridden absent nevertheless. He felt he was been being punished for a thing he hadn't yet done. He fought fires all that day and night and the next and so many people and animals had died you could smell cooked flesh everywhere you went and he left as soon as was morally possible. He told no one as they would have protested and offered him a job and food and he just rode and rode and came here and was now where he was. In another fire. Still just him. Everything important to him still a charred corpse. The heat lapping at him as they started to go through where the ignition was right by the way, he was half a mile out and the horse was getting uneasy so he leant down in discomfort and talked it through. Told it they would go for it soon and leave this. He checked his guns and cocked both on the ready. The perspiration was dropping off he and the horse where it had welled with too much weight and gusts of breeze now were stingingly warm and like acid on their eyes. He kicked the horse and they went hell for it up the arid artery that split the inferno's middle and he had shot dead a white man slicing into a dark body still moving before he had time to even think about how he would shoot with his barrel arm how it was. He shot from the horse with his rifle and pierced the neck straight through spurting crimson sizzling into the fire. He rode over and looked down at young aboriginal boy writhing and grunting against the whistle and crack of the flames with his guts bleeding and leg cut to bone and he shot him through the head with his pistol. There was death and dying everywhere, all wounds being sealed by the fire, scorched remains and atrocities all over. He went over then to a house in centre away from the deadly heat and tied the horse inside it away from the smoke that was choking them both so badly. He kissed the animal's shoulder and told him not to worry none then held the rifle butt against his bicep, his arm crook and tucked against his side, he figured he could gauge accuracy from his own centre, he aimed at something and clipped it just, he readjusted his sight from his centre and then shot a tin cup clean through off the table about six feet away. He tucked it even tighter and shot the middle pane out of window on the other side of the room. He turned then and braced himself for the heat outside the door. The horror of it would hit him harder.
- He stumbled through smoke tripping over bodies nearly all native with gun shot wounds most from close range and most hacked some too. Some white men were dead or dying with spear wounds. Children were deceased on the ground. Women were being raped both dead and alive. The natives had no guns. They could not afford them or be allowed them. Everything was sweating be it dead or alive. It was a massacre. Heads were being carried about by men drunk and sneering falling over limbs with babies wailing and thrown in the fire and some dark men were still fighting or hiding or gurgling strangled or on their own blood, the noises all around nightmarish screeches and moans above and below the roar of the fire. Men were sodomizing women on the dirt pushing their heads hard into the ground and one did the same to a man half dead continually lifting and bashing his skull back and forth into the dirt. Some whites were butchering corpses after what had begun as scalping, organs were being removed and kicked into the furnace and he saw Smith just drinking his whiskey from the bottle leaning about a tall gum tree that no fire had yet caught. He placed himself behind the lump of a speared horse and he took to aiming and firing from his knees. He shot clean from the initial, he didn't want much and only took to those committing the worst acts, he knew he was no judge, was no jury, all he knew was right and wrong and how each felt and he shot as many natives in agony as he did white men putting that agony in them. All died by his bullet just once. Clean in the head or neck or chest. The attacks on the women stopped on his account. The torture on an old man being burned with hot tree limbs ended too. He shot the old man through the chest as well as he'd seen the infections and pain that came with those burns. Two kids had seen him doing what he was. They came and huddled by him and he told them to get and hide where his horse was. He pointed it out and they did as were told. A white man he knew well saw him and went to run back to Smith and the others who were sitting around him now with the place burnt out mostly and the surrounds seeming just black and grey and smoking some green and yellow surviving in places and the sun starting to set sudden behind them red as wet blood seeping out a vein and enveloping the whole of the sky and lending itself to the burnt out plain so as it tinged crimson all over as the fire raged on toward where the station was but would die and choke itself of fuel as it blistered and scorched until the river. He shot him through the back as he made to sprint over. It was all a wasteland of departed plant and human life. Nothing moved up to where Smith and his followers sat. It was all dead and they'd even taken to shooting the animals that the aborigines had kept. They still had whiskey left and passed it round laughingly. A white man came from a structure not burnt and bought an aboriginal girl with him. He snapped her forward in jolting pulls of her hair and she fought but came and he could see it was the girl he had seen Smith with in the stable that time. She was naked and an argument ensued. He assumed Smith had placed her at safety and his counterpart hadn't known the full plan of it. He watched now, Smith spoke to the girl calmly and tenderly. He grabbed the man by the shoulder and hit him complete in the gut which sent him to his knees. Smith had no hesitation and dislodged his pistol and stuck it firm into the man's forehead, the man was Wells, a stable hand, with the fire dead around them he could hear him pleading saying I didn't Smith, please I didn't, check inside her boy I put nothing near her, Smith said what sounded like yeah but you were gonna and he never moved the pistol from the other man's skin and the red of the sun was everywhere, it was sinking down under the plain out behind them and was glowing intense like the embers that the wind would light up glowing now and then, all the smoke was swept away east and the fire had gone there with it and was burning out down by the river, this tense scene in front of him was all black with sun blush and it was as if two silhouettes played it out now with a bunch of shadows either side of them, he backed off now creeping hurtfully away closer to the place his horse and the children were in, the acrid smell of everything making his senses finer, his eyesight more acute, he took aim at the crown of the skull of Smith, he tucked the weapon tight and compact into himself and felt it as if the barrel were an extension of what his arm should be, the pain and anguish in him roared some, he fired and it rang across the place over the creaking and scurrying and fizzing of a mass fire just dying, the top of Smith's head exploded open dark against the sun's live colour as if his head were a puddle of mud someone had stomped solid in, the body of him slumped onto the man he was threatening to do the same to and all the men left over turned and aimed and he was already inside on his horse with the two boys at his front. He had jammed the door open with a spear tore from a corpse and held the reins in his mouth as he flew out with the pistol extended for covering fire and he let off some rounds as they gunned out across and down the track hitting men with four of the six bullets fired and they shot back dismally and agreed quickly that he was lost to them in his own dust. He galloped the horse hard for as much as he knew it could take going back toward the house and past through the shallow river bed outrunning the fire easily and following the river north as it got dark then going west and deciding on going that way til he hit the waves of an ocean. The boys slept atop the horse and he slid in and out of it dreaming once of leaving behind his girl that had died in the fire instead of the one he had left at the station, her saying words he couldn't hear and then him snapping awake with some roos crashing through the bush. He shot one with his pistol being that they were so close. They camped not long without fire as he knew they would come for him and that his start would mean much and also that rest would have to come later. That ate the roo meat raw and drank water they had collected earlier. The boys understood why no fire was allowed and ate without complaint. They rode again within one hour. Through the blue light of a greatly mooned darkness. A lighter blue coming as the sun rose behind them and everything seeming shadowy in that light or without true colour. His arm had turned black, as had his ribs where they were broken and parts of him where discoloured with bruising all over. His eye had come better than he thought it would and he could open it fully though it ached when he did. They rode and rode through morning and then through the close heat of the day much thicker with clouds all over which he reasoned was better than the day before when they would have had to rest on and off time and again or the heat would had killed them quicker than a bullet wound in the belly. They came across natives who lived true off the land without interference and he gave them the boys and explained as best he could what had happened though really the boys did. The people gave him water and vegetables and a covering made of roo skin and he warned them that these white men might be coming this way. They motioned into the distance with their hands and he understood they were telling him they would move along. He rode off and still went west and camped very late in the pitch dark with no fire and the satellite missing and the stars misplaced too as the clouds had stayed rolled in. There was no sunset that day. The air was still close and he felt his skin dirty and damp and just thought of the sea he would wash in. He'd been to the sea before, with his brother, his father, a few times with his girl, all separate distinct occasions that now played in his mind so austere and unforgivingly happy that he wept then, wept alone in the dark with memories of loved ones dancing in the late downing sunshine bouncing orange off luminous cobalt sea, he wept uncontrollably and lay on the dirt seized with a sadness he knew too well, one he couldn't stop, he had nothing but his horse and his self and he had no idea why things were the way they were and why he had to deal with what had happened at the station and why he had to ride off again across the Australian land looking for a place to just be. In his sorrow he held the pistol to his head, shoved it into his temple and thought the verdict of people lost and desperate, thought he had nothing and would be nothing and that they would come for him until they made him end, he just wanted his family back, his girl, the dog that he loved and he got up from where he was seated then and went to the horse and hugged it's flank, it was so dark and he felt the sweat run down his jaw line and fall from his face, he felt his tears warm on his face too and horse sidled his way and he smiled and dropped the gun to the ground, he said to the horse then, this is just between you and me boy. He smiled. Then he lay down there and slept.
- Raindrops heavy as stones woke him pelting through the trees and he got up and got ready thinking well thank bloody something we got us some luck. The rain brought the scents of everything into the air especially the humid soil and flowering bushes and he could smell the horse too. He knew that the rain if heavy enough would leave them no tracks, he knew it cause he had experienced it himself when shooting, no tracks meant guessing and this land was too big to guess at. All was wetted and kept that way for hours with the sky granite and he raced the horse through it til light and then kept going and it fell from the sky wet in some way or another for the entire time of it the silver clouds staying there above entire and he saw the sea as the sun was disappearing without trace behind that metallic veil and he made for it harder than he had ridden all that day. He threw off the little he carried onto the white sand and rode the horse straight into the waves. The cool of it was for him something delightful and meaningful, he stripped away his clothes hurling them landward and swam naked with the horse and washed all the sweat of he and the steed away, the blood of his and others left too, he rubbed off the smell and dirt and filth and mud and he walked the beach letting the wind cool his entirety. The saltwater had soothed all his wounds some and he swam again later letting this work some more. He camped on the beach that night lighting a fire with his flint and pissing directly into the ocean. In the morning he had decided on following the shoreline directly by the water southward until he hit a town and he knew they were many along that coastline. He slept on the roo skin the natives had given him. He slept well. In the morning he looked out to sea waist deep in waves and water with the early sun behind his back risen in the east, standing alone and the sadness in him welling but no tears would come and he didn't know why. He wanted to weep. Couldn't. He stood on the shore for some time then. He rode it for days too. Watched the sun set and rise on the water. He felt some misery about the station now. He wanted his life from before that time there back so bad it hurt in his chest and left his stomach hollow. He wanted it back so as the time at the station never was. He had never wanted it back more. What had happened had triggered it leaking into him and he knew that and he wished it all away. But all he could do was ride on the shore til he got somewhere, and he was determined to get somewhere. He would ride where the sea would wash and had observed how the horse's tracks were swept away by the water coming and going and how it took more than one wave to leave no mark in the sand at all but that eventually those tracks were extinguished and how if you rode further up from the water your tracks would last longer til the tide came in and how that damp sand held tracks better than the wetted stuff but that still eventually those tracks would extinguish too. The only place real marks were left was if you rode by the scrub where your tracks were deep and dry and would avoid being erased all together, staying almost forever not hit by water or wind and he'd come across feet and hoof that were still visible after what it looked to his eye may have been months. He rode here most and studied the tracks left before him. At first he felt some wrong with trampling what was left before him but that left like the way his hurt left him during the day but haunted him at night. He saw the smoke of fires to the east. Watched the stars rumble and crowd at night and the moon buff on the dark chop of the rolling sinister mass that never quit. A lonely kid riding looking for a place to rest. Thoughts of the girls he'd truly known at times would run through him like electricity, violent and blue. He found a little town in time. Sent word for the girl at the station. Drank a great deal. Waiting for her working days rousing sheep. Spent his nights gambling. Making eyes with whores. Would have liked to have been killed in a bar fight the night of the day she never came and willed the knife to slit his throat and let his blood spray across the room but that particular man was all bluff and in the morning after throwing up again and again and admitting to himself he knew she would never come he took to riding his way south along the beach once more where his tracks joined those others who'd ridden before him. Nothing got rid of the hurt, nothing he had tried. All he had was his horse, his two guns and his self. He figured in the next town he would try to find a good girl, one he could tell of his family and life and who would have a bath filled waiting after work each day and cook him breakfast every morning and she'd be so pretty that that word wouldn't even be acceptable for use to her description. it was thinking that got you. She would have his sons. He would never leave them. hazy golden hued warmth stolen from remembrance with added simplicity and weight. Thinking like this hurt him badly. He cried with it at times alone at night. could something mean that much to somebody? He willed his thoughts away from past or future and focused on practicality. Shooting. Riding. Building a decent fire. Making good coffee. probably it could. He still cursed at the sky and would til he had something to thank it for. Just what he had wasn't near enough. So he rode until he got some place. did. He rode thinking how any man could know anything, not matter who that man was. He rode on. He thought on. There was not a thing else for him to do.
