‘Ssshhh,’ Greta snaps back sharply, silently stepping over Yukio’s body and bending down to pick up the handgun. She shakes her head towards the dark valley running out of the canyon and deeper into the black scrub.
‘C’mon,’ Greta whispers.
‘We can’t just leave him out here in the bush like this,’ Molly says.
‘Ssshhh!’ Greta says again. She grits her teeth, nodding furiously at the gravedigger girl then runs a finger along her neck and that finger turns into a fist and a thumb pointing up the canyon. She silently mouths her final word. Now!
Molly turns back to Yukio. He’s sweating. There’s a war going on inside him and Molly knows the strange and warm-faced pilot is losing that war like Darwin is losing a war north of here, back by the sea. Molly has seen her father shake like this. Deep shaking. Involuntary. She knew when she saw that shaking that her father had a trouble inside him that could not be soothed from the outside. All she could do was pat her father’s forehead and whisper, ‘Sssshhhh, Dad, sssshhhh. It’s all right, Dad.’ What she meant was that she knew she was only ten or eleven or twelve but everything was going to be all right as long as they had each other. Then she sees her father in her mind, limbless and bomb-torn and wedged inside the fork of a tree. She closes her eyes and when she opens them again she removes the aviator jacket and places it over Yukio. ‘Ssshhhhh,’ she whispers into his ear and the sound seems to still the pilot. So she whispers again: ‘Ssshhhh. It’s all right, it’s all right.’
*
She is still wearing his flight helmet when she turns and follows Greta into the forest darkness that waits beyond the canyon, and she is still wearing it when they stumble blindly through a thick infestation of thorny mesquite trees with branches that seem to reach out to Molly and tear at her exposed skin.
The earth rebels, she tells herself. It rebels against wrongdoers, she tells herself. Sam knew this. Molly knew this. The earth in rebellion. Buffalo charging at cars. Crocodiles stalking girls in creeks. Tree branches reaching out to strangle her dead in the dark.
She’s still wearing the pilot’s helmet when she walks face-first through the circular web of a golden orb spider. The web is made of golden yellow silk and its miraculous architecture is so grand that it stretches the whole way across the path they follow through moonlit monsoon vine thickets. The girl feels the web’s maker, a female spider with a body three inches long, land on the back of the pilot’s leather helmet and she leans forward knowing she’s in the wrong here, knowing that the golden orb spider spent hours in this forest darkness constructing her grand silk insect trap only to have it destroyed by the careless head of a Darwin gravedigger girl.
She puts a light hand to the back of her head, brushing the spider off the helmet. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, as much to the spider as to the Japanese pilot they left back in the canyon. The foreigner in as foreign a land as he could ever fall into from the sky. If the earth can rebel, she tells herself, then the sky can, too. A sky gift rejected. A sky gift left behind. A sky gift abandoned in a canyon.
‘We shouldn’t have left him back there,’ Molly says.
Greta holds Bert the shovel in her hands, waves it at the darkness before her, batting down branches and vines.
‘He’s been droppin’ bombs on folks across the world,’ Greta says. ‘Stop sparing thoughts for the bastards who just blew half your house to Adelaide.’
‘The sky wanted us to meet him,’ Molly says.
‘Is that right?’ Greta replies. She stops and turns to Molly, agitated, tired. ‘And I guess the sky wanted your father blown to bits?’
Molly stops now, too. She wonders who, indeed, wanted that to happen to her father. Her father, Horace, the good and the bad one, blown across the yard and lodged in the fork of a tree. Blood dripping from his thigh where the rest of his leg used to be. Who did ask for that? She’d asked for another gift from the sky. Then the sky had rained Japanese bombs. Who did ask for that?
*
They beat a loose path through a fringe of red ash trees that meets a rocky incline where a solitary pandanus tree stands, its wedge-shaped, bright-red fruits looking like the kinds of jewels Aubrey and Horace Hook would rob from Hollow Wood’s dead. When their improvised course takes them higher across sandstone ranges and rises, the moon throws enough light down for the actress and the gravedigger girl to see the land that unfolds before them. Then they follow a clearer path through the trees and the sandstone gullies and outcrops. Sam Greenway might have walked this way once, Molly tells herself. His people have walked this path for millennia and so have the short-eared rock wallabies and the black-footed tree rats and the short-beaked echidnas and the golden bandicoots. And now the gravedigger girl and the actress.
The moon is silver and the stars surrounding it dutifully assemble into shapes for Molly. An arrow. An elephant. A warrior’s shield. A gravestone.
Her mother, Violet, made her promise she would make her life beautiful and grand and poetic and she promised her mother that she would write her own epitaph, that she would live a life that could be written about with ease on an upright slab of limestone.
Now the night sky whispers to her, ‘What would it say, Molly? And be honest. I’m not like that fool the day sky. I will know if you are lying.’
‘I know exactly what it will say,’ Molly whispers.
HERE LIES BRAVE ORPHAN MOLLY
HOOK WHO LOST HER MOTHER AND FATHER
BEFORE THE AGE OF 13 AND SET OFF INTO
THE NORTHERN AUSTRALIAN WILDERNESS
IN SEARCH OF A SORCERER NAMED
LONGCOAT BOB BUT
