Read Online The Mary Smokes Boys by Patrick Holland - Free Book Online Page A

Grey said the boys were still waiting. Eccleston talked through his smoke and asked if Grey was coming out with them tonight and Grey shook his head. Eccleston mussed Irene’s hair.
    “You’re going to Toogoolawah.”
    “Reckon so. Came into some money. You saw the fight?”
    “I saw part of it. You feel all right?”
    “Yeah.”
    “What about the other boy?”
    “He’s all right.”
    The old black man trailing Eccleston was Possum Gallanani. After Eccleston returned from Borallon, Possum continued the education begun by the boy’s father. He taught Eccleston how to
break horses and how to track brumbies by the marks they made with their teeth in trees, and he and the boy worked for three months taking colts and fillies out of the Carnarvon Gorge and turning them into saddle horses–stealing cattle that had escaped into the national park meanwhile. But “No jobs now for old blackfella,” Possum would say. And it was true. He did not have the know-how to apply for a social security check. He did not have a bank account. He could neither read nor write. He lived off money from a scant few jobs for August Tanner and from his illegal whisky run.
    “What’s up with Pos?”
    Eccleston smiled.
    The old man whimpered and clutched his behind.
    “He got shot with salt pellets,” Eccleston said, “cuttin home across Tanner’s northwest country from my place.”
    “Just now?”
    “Just now.”
    “What were you up to, Pos?”
    Possum grunted with disgust. Eccleston spoke for him.
    “He was usin my keg to make his whisky, then was sneakin it back home in the dark.”
    Many old men of the country made their own drink, but a black man carrying homemade liquor along the highway at night was a needless temptation to offer already bored police. So the clandestine route.
    “Why the hell would Tanner have reason to shoot?’ Grey said.
    “He reckons someone’s been strippin the heads off his milo for birdseed. The old bastard’s been sittin out there in the afternoons watchin for his thief.”
    “Pos?”
    “Yep. But he doesn’t use it for birdseed. He mashes it up and eats it himself.”
    Possum gave another groan of pain.

    “He’ll be all right,” Eccleston said. “I’ve been hit with those things before.”
    He said they had already taken out the pellets with tweezers. The word “tweezers’ drew a wail from the old Aborigine.
    “I was on the fuggin creek,” he said. “Tanner yells at me the creek’s the Queen’s land. I said to im, I never seen er walkin it!”
    The boys laughed.
    “The Queen’s too busy cartin whisky up and down creeks in England,” said Eccleston. “And anyway, you don’t know how to walk this country, old man, that’s why you ended up shot.”
    “I can walk anywhere within a thousand miles a ere. When I’m sober. Before me eyes went bad, I could.”
    It was true that a film of sun-induced cataracts lay over the old man’s red eyes.
    Eccleston smiled.
    “You went to the house?’ said Grey.
    “That’s right.”
    “How was Bill?”
    He shrugged and Grey nodded. It was a hopeless hope–that he might have been able to leave Irene at home after all.
    They left Eccleston and Possum on their way to the lake. The lights of cars leaving town banded the western dark.
     
    IRENE CLIMBED ONTO the round bonnet of her brother’s truck and Grey told her to wait for him there. The sky was blown clean of cloud now and the firmament hung over them in full gleaming array. Irene lay back on the windscreen.
    She could name much of the night sky–Sirius and Canopus and Rigel and Betelgeuse, which she called “belting geese’, and the lesser stars too, all at a glance. She took the names from a survey of astronomy that her mother had used at school. She knew to the night and to the hour what would rise. She quizzed Grey on which luminaries were which–which were stars and which were planets–but his eyes were not strong enough to see
the absence of flicker in the planets and it was a