Two tramlines cut through the long grass toward the fence: Cal Burns and a young stationhand. Only Burns dismounted; the boyremained on his horse. Burns settled his hat, kicked a fence post, flicked the wire, scanned the field, noticed the shouldersprotruding either side of the red gum. He walked closer, into the clearing, smiled, and said to the boy, “Watch this,” thendrew his revolver, cocked it, and fired a warning shot high into the air.
The crack sent Tommy scrambling. He dropped to the dirt, covered his head with both hands, eyes wide and full of fear, as Arthur swiveled and looked around the tree and told him, “It’s all right, mate, it’s all right. It’s only Burns.”
They could already hear him howling. Arthur took hold of Tommy’s arm, hauled him to his feet, and led him out into the field,Tommy unsteady from the shock still, trembling, fixing Burns with a hateful glare. The overseer could not stop laughing, eggingon the stationhand.
“Look at the bloody state of him! You’re wetter than a waterhole, McBride!”
“Don’t do nothing stupid now,” Arthur whispered as they neared, shuffling into the clearing, presenting themselves in frontof Burns.
“And what, are you two courting now—let go of his arm.”
Arthur did so. Tommy swayed a little then straightened. His face was flushed, his jaw set, eyes boring into Burns. The overseernoticed and his own expression changed.
“I was only pulling your pizzle, boy. Take a bloody joke.”
“Nothing funny about it,” Tommy said. “The hell’s your problem?”
“Sleeping on the job’s my problem. Lucky I don’t have you both flogged.”
“Lunchtime, boss,” Arthur said.
Burns sneered at him. “You watch your mouth, nigger. And put a fucking shirt on, you ain’t in the tribe no more.”
Arthur hesitated, glanced at Tommy, then slipped past Burns to the fence line, where his shirt still hung on the wire. Burnsstepped close to Tommy, almost nose to nose, a smell of tobacco and tooth rot when he spoke: “Eyes on you like dinner plates—yougot something more to say to me, McBride?”
The muscle on Tommy’s jawline creased. Holding it all in. He’d known so many men like this over the years, most overseerswere the same. The first had been the absolute worst of them—he could still taste Raymond Locke’s filthy fingers digging inhis mouth, trying to pinch his tongue. Locke got what was coming in the end, though. The sounds he’d made while Noone torturedhim, the unearthly way he’d screamed . . .
Burns was still waiting. “No, nothing,” Tommy said. They needed the money, him and Arthur, the food, the lodgings, the work. This was the first steady living they’d made in months.
“So what’s with the face?”
“There was no call to shoot at us. We were only having lunch.”
“I shot in the bloody air! Hell, if I’d shot at you you’d have known about it. Don’t be so soft.” Burns scowled at him. “What’s wrong with you, anyway? There something not rightin your head?”
He tapped the revolver against Tommy’s forehead. Tommy only blinked. Glancing at Arthur, pulling his shirt on, he said, “Bestbe getting on, boss,” through gritted teeth. “Lots more posts need putting in.”
“I asked you a question. What’s your problem? What’s with them dreams?”
“Like I said, we’d best be getting on.”
Burns’s eyes narrowed. “You’ve always been a cocky cunt, haven’t you, McBride. Thinking you’re better than the rest of us.Acting like your shit don’t stink.”
Tommy went to move past him. Burns put a hand on his chest, his revolver hand, the gun metal warm through Tommy’s shirt. Adarkness was slowly consuming the overseer; it was right there in his stare. Smirking, he slopped his tongue around his mouth,stepped back, and raised the revolver, four distinct clicks of the hammer ratcheting through its gates.
“How about this? Not so cocky now, eh?”
Tommy could hardly hear him. All a blur behind the muzzle: he’d been thrust back five years, into the foothills of the Bewleyranges, far away in the north, watching Noone corral a group of natives and a pack of wild dogs, demanding that they lay downtheir spears; then, when they didn’t obey him, leveling his gilded silver pistol at one man’s forehead, just as Burns didto Tommy now, and casually blowing open his face.
Tommy lunged, knocking aside the revolver and shoving Burns so hard he fell. Incredible, how little weight there was to him,how easily he went down. No control when he landed. Limp as a sack of grain. Body first, then his head, whipping backwardand smacking off the sunbaked earth with such force that it bounced like a ball.
All was still for a moment. Cal Burns didn’t move. His eyes rolled so only the whites were visible and his legs began to twitch to the toes. His arms lay flaccid, his hands upturned—Tommy looked on in despair. Why had he pointed the revolver? Why had he even fallen? Why not just stumble? Why not catch himself when he hit the ground? Vaguely he was aware of movement in the paddock—Arthur running from the fence line, the young stationhand turning his horse and bolting across the fields—but now blood had begun to seep from Burns’s nostril and trickle down his cheek, and although Arthur arrived, yelling “Fuck, Tommy!” and fumbling for a pulse in the overseer’s neck, Tommy knew just by the look of him, and from the dozens, the hundreds, of corpses he’d seen in his short life, that he wasn’t waking up. He turned away, horrified. Chalk another on his tally. Burns was as good as dead.
Chapter 3
Billy McBride
In a clearing around the back of his family’s old farmhouse, Billy stood twisting his hat in his hands, staring at two bare-earthgraves overgrown with weeds and buffel grass, indistinguishable from the surrounding scrub, as if the bush had swallowed themtotally; only the crooked white crosses remained.
“Paddocks are up, anyhow. Drought’s broke. I got rid of that dam.”
He stared off into the
