Carpentaria by Alexis Wright Read Free Book Online

for the purposes of protecting the town against encroachment from people who were not like themselves?
    ‘Ya mean coons?’ Sanguine-voiced, the local mayor was speaking. A big, beefy, six-two, no-fuss man, who liked to call chalk chalk, or night night. That was his motto. He overshadowed the town with his power.
    ‘Excuse me, Mr Bruiser, Mayor, you don’t have to talk like that. We are just saying that they are an eyesore, so what are you going to do about it?’
    Stan Bruiser was a straight speaker and was such a popular mayor for Uptown of Desperance, that for ten straight years, he had been voted its citizen of the year. It was rigged , some said of the voting box in the Council office. But be what it may, tampering with a ballot box was no great sin when conspiratory theorists worked with no proof. Bruiser, now fifty-six, was a prosperous cattle man, with Elvis combed-back hair and sideburns, dyed the colour of a Santa Gertrudis. He was a hawker by trade until his change of luck due to a foray into the Australian stock market, after he picked up a hint late one night on the radio in the mining-boom seventies. Next day, he piled his last quids in the stock exchange on a tin-pot mining company that struck it rich in Western Australia. So very quick, he was rich.
    Good luck to him one supposes, for he cleaned up with his shares and with the spoils, means and wherewithal, he reinvented himself, from somebody driving around the outback’s dying towns and Aboriginal camps on pension day, selling the necessities of life for a profit of three to four hundred per cent after costs. A quid to be made. But just how could one uneducated man, a man just like themselves, make so much money in his lifetime? It was unnatural. Anyone could have done it, he joked, if he had been half smart about prices by collecting drought-time cattle properties like lollies, paying unpaid debts.
    Bruiser spoke of being the epitome of the self-made man, and the ‘self-made 24/7 man’ angle was slotted into his utterings to other Desperanians during Australia Day, May Day, Picnic Day, Pioneer Day celebrations where he had the right to speak, right through, down to the demands he made of politicians whose colleagues heard his booming voice on the phone in the hallowed halls of southern parliaments.
    The old people in the Pricklebush said the story about the money of hell was different, because Bruiser had unnatural scars that looked like someone had welded an extra skin to his body. They had observed the extra piece of skin that ran from his skull down the left side of his face, along one side of his body, down to his feet and back again, running up the back this time, right up to his skull. Was that unusual? Darn right! Everyone in the Pricklebush thought so. Some of the old ladies were more than curious and yelled out whenever he came down to the Pricklebush camps – ‘Hey! How come the devil stitched you up like a pod?’ Bruiser was sensitive about his scars and ignored their questions. So they spread the word he was an alien, though wisely no one dared say such a thing to his face. You would have to be nuts to say anything like that to Bruiser.
    Bruiser said he had seen everything as far as he was concerned and there was only one motto to life. ‘If you can’t use it, eat it, or fuck it, then it’s no bloody use to you.’ It brought the house down as usual. This was how the town would size up the problem of Aboriginal people squatting behind their houses, he explained with a loud clap of his hands, encouraging others to do the same. He said the government should put the Abos to work and he would write a letter to every politician this side of the black stump telling them exactly that. He nutted out how this employment policy would work. He said they would do what he did to make a living. ‘Put them to work making keys so they can lock their food up somewhere and not have to share everything they get with their families.’ He explained that