She approaches the strange rock formation from behind and then she shivers in the blue moonlight when she realises the carved face is performing a miraculous balancing act, somehow leaning forward with all its weight on a single, small slab of ancient rock. A full human face of rock resting on only one-third of a neck. The formation should, by the natural rules of gravity, have plummeted off the overhang a thousand years ago, but it stays in place, leaning forward to say to Molly that it’s trying to look at something, that it’s trying so hard to see something, but sandstone eyes can’t see, so the face will stay right here in this precarious place until those eyes turn to the colour of the sky and they can see for miles like Molly Hook.
She runs her hand over the diamond-shaped nose and the remarkable crease that looks like the valley where an upper and bottom lip meet, and she runs her hands over the eyes that cannot see and she sees someone she knows, someone she longs to see.
‘Dad,’ she whispers. And Walt Whitman reminds her of the deathless death. ‘“I know I am deathless.”’
‘“Missing me one place, search another,”’ she says. ‘“I stop somewhere waiting for you.”’
And she sees her father’s deep eyes. The overhang of his sorrow. The rubble of his past. The jagged edges of his weaknesses. The dusty lips of his regret. Her father sits with Ol’ Man Rock now, she tells herself. Horace Hook and the maker of mountains, she tells herself, trying to make sense of what happened here on earth. Trying to understand the making of men like Aubrey Hook.
Sam says he can ask Ol’ Man Rock anything and he always receives a correct answer.
‘Where is the silver road?’ Molly whispers.
And she finds her answer in those deep sandstone eyes. She follows the gaze of the rock face and she walks to the edge of the overhang, so close that she could fall to her death with a careless misstep. And she leans her head down like the rock face does and she can see what the rock face cannot see. A still freshwater lake lit by the moon, and from the edge of this lake runs a twisting path that shimmers like it’s made of stardust. A crystal glass snake winding through darkened monsoon forest. And as she stands there, the sun wakes up and the first rising slice of its light meets the glowing of the moon and the silver road sparkles like a luminous diamond necklace, unfastened and endless, dropped in the deep country, bending and curving and cutting through the forest. A magic road for those with the kind of eyes that can see it, twisting and turning towards the silver horizon, towards the gold, towards the treasure, towards Longcoat Bob.
‘Greta!’ Molly shouts, and the name echoes across the deep country.
THE ADMIRAL’S FROCK
An olive-coloured Model A Ford pulls over to the side of a thin red dirt road lined with orange-flowered honeysuckle trees. Aubrey Hook yanks hard on the Ford’s handbrake and the action makes the wound in his left shoulder howl with blinding pain. He slowly unbuttons his work shirt. The dried yellow-white pus of the bite wound has stuck hard to the fabric of his shirt. He pulls on his sleeve, tearing away the pus-rimmed scabbing that has built up around the edge. Only hate could have caused such a wound, he tells himself. Only hate could turn a man into a dingo like that, turn his younger brother, Horace, into a wild dog who could bite the flesh from his own brother’s shoulder.
He gets out of the car and assesses the damage to his shoulder in the car’s side mirror. An infected mess of pus and blood – his brother’s teeth were rotting like his own. There are white-bellied mangrove snakes sliding along the mudlined creeks beyond those honeysuckle trees and they spend their days eating dead mud crabs and poison-bellied toads and they still have fangs less infectious than Horace Hook’s pearly blacks. He looks at the wound and all he sees in the side mirror is the gravedigger girl and her miserable story and the series of miserable events that placed his brother beneath that Japanese bomb that removed his body so inconveniently from his left leg. Not a Hook at all, he tells himself. The girl is a Berry through and through.
He buttons his shirt and walks along the dirt road. On the right side of the road he drops his head to follow two parallel wheel tracks that run down an incline to his own red utility truck, which sits abandoned with its front bonnet crumpled hard against a cluster of stringybark trees. The truck’s windows are wide open and, on the driver’s side, it appears that something smashed into the vehicle. Aubrey retraces his steps and paces back along the road, past his parked automobile, to a series of skid marks bending and curving across the damp dirt road. Then, back further along the road, a series of animal footprints running from one side of the road to the other. He turns to the roadside trees and scrublands that wall a fertile woodland stretching to the sea in the far distance. Not the prints of horses. These hoofprints are too widely spaced for cows. These animals had agility. Buffalo, he tells himself. And he ponders the grave misfortune of the actress and the gravedigger girl. Imagine living with that kind of luck, he tells himself. To be cursed with such black fortune that your vehicle is run off
