Free When Colts Ran by Roger McDonald Page B

her, so why wouldn’t you?’
    A woman handing a man’s wife back to him.
    â€˜I liked your Hoppy too,’ said Buckler. ‘I don’t think he minded me for who I am in myself, either. Just for where I came sandwiched in his life. So where does that leave us?’
    Rusty played with an unlit Lucky Strike, and he wondered where she’d scored it.
    Buckler loosened his tie and Rusty brought him a whisky. For herself, a hock and lemon.
    They sat for a while in facing chairs in the cool, afternoon-deserted parlour.
    â€˜To what was.’ They raised their glasses. ‘Don’t look so hangdog, Dunc.’
    So quickly they’d schemed love in. He’d not needed a change of clothes whenever he returned to the Hill. A suit left was aired of naphthalene, a bottle of beer was on ice, corned meat sandwiches and hot mustard. Such earnest, devoted touches piercing him through. She had caddied for him at golf, running the scraper over the oiled sand greens to receive his putt and each step made over the blighted links was towards their lovemaking later. And a gift – a small parcel – of ruby cufflinks, jewels grubbed from dry hills up Dingo way where he’d found her and sis. Holding them to the light, seeing her fingers tremble as she tried them against her wrists. Then he’d know the night he was in for. Why that unprecedented feeling. Why that poignant premonition that culminated, he now realised, at this time, in this place over in the rough where Harris’s drive had lofted him.
    â€˜Arriving with a lawyer was a nice touch.’
    â€˜He warned me off, lowering his eyes like a bull. I’m tired of it, Dunc,’ said Rusty.
    Not much later they went to her room because life, when on fire, ran back over itself sometimes.
    *
    Rusty kicked off her shoes, unpeeled her stockings, unhooked her skirt and shed a white petticoat, shaking out her great Irish hair, cool as the ghost of their too few encounters and free and as prodigally young as they kissed. ‘This is goodbye,’ she murmured.
    Buckler thought as he loved her: You worked and you drove and you hammered through fate, you swam to the stars, but if the patterns weren’t yours, if the blessings of meaning bypassed you, then what were you to yourself, where was there left to go? Just the strike at beauty as you fell to earth – which had formerly saved you in rainbow patterns of oily mud and versions of sword dancing, against all odds.
    â€˜I’m not safe.’ Rusty pushed against him, held him.
    Head hanging over the bed, Buckler saw a spider swinging between the uprights weaving a small web in the dust. Brother , he thought, the blood rushing to his brow.
    Too soon Rusty untangled herself from the sheets, asked him to go, dressed and left the room. Buckler rolled over and shed hot tears into the pillows, a few rough sobs. Not like him at all, the scalding of sinuses, the stuffing up of nostrils.
    Dear Rusty , he called to her in his mind, you were the soldier’s love, chosen to walk through the fire, not my fire as it turns out so astoundingly simplified down to this night, nor my struggle of a lifetime’s continuance, my dreams on heaven’s dust-scattered floor .
    Buckler sucked air into his pleura, encountering a cracked rib.
    Then to Veronica the next day. She was wishbone-thin, sun-browned, the tips of her rough-cut hair turned almost white-gold from the sun. She was back to the independent and characterful stance of their early life together, in the ’30s.
    She gave an account of her ride with Colts on the BSA and sidecar, Limestone Hills to the Darling River. She told him about the horses – dead – the swagman – dead – the caravan – burned. His mind on fluff she gave as a cause of death, dismay and madness. If a further example was needed, she gave the pungent detail of his BSA’s new owner, a rank madwoman herding goats. At Broken Hill