Free Holden's Performance by Murray Bail Page A

‘And he's good. You can ask him about anything under the sun.’
    â€˜What, he knows everything, does he? You can't catch him out?’
    â€˜He works at the Advertiser .’
    McBee made a brief arse-wiping movement. ‘That's all the newspapers are good for.’
    The boy had to laugh.
    â€˜Anyway,’ Holden returned to his pet subject, ‘where do all the old planes come from? These ones that we see?’
    Lighting a cigarette McBee flicked the match away.
    And that afternoon Holden was taken on a longer, deliberate ride out of the city. They parted a furrow through a corridor of waist-high grasses which swayed and rippled in the turbulence. When the road shifted a few points towards the setting sun the bleached paddocks, the low hills to the right, and even the trunks of occasional gum trees were overrun by a lava of blinding orange. All this Holden saw with his head to one side. He followed the rapidly receding perspective of stalks, fractured densities and fencing endlessly repeating itself. At set intervals the darker verticals of telegraph poles made abrupt exclamations, and he watched the shadow of himself hunched on the elongated insect-machine advancing rhythmically and retreating.
    The aerodrome serving Adelaide was at a place called Para-field (as in ‘parachute’ and ‘paratrooper’ the aircraft industry resorted to the prefix, testifying to the artificiality of human flight). Holden had glimpsed the first windsock as McBee turned right. The motorbike bumped along a dusty track away from the aerodrome. Holden hopped off to unhook an agricultural gate; McBee accelerated away leaving him standing there.
    Through a screen of trees he saw a small paddock crammed full of aluminium aeroplanes: DC3s mostly, a few wingless Wirraways and Ansons. As he ran towards them a Sutherland flying boat came into view, moored like an exhausted silver duck in the khaki waters of the dam. And above it crows and hawks circled thermally.
    Holden had never seen a graveyard of planes. They were arranged more or less into cemetery rows. Perspex noses and scratched alloy surfaces glittered at the foot of drought-stricken hills. And there was no doubt the RAAF circular markings endowed them with heroic histories; being grounded only added to the poignancy.
    No such feelings afflicted McBee.
    Throughout the late 1940s there were two prevailing caricatures of dealers in scrap.
    First, the greying old boy behind the desk sporting the striped tie; bought and sold the surplus aircraft on the advice of others, along with pig iron, railway sleepers and wheat crops; all sight unseen, over the telephone. Clean fingernails: scrap metal being only a recent and temporary segment of his turnover. A slow-moving, sedentary operator. Time was always on his side. When General Motors set up manufacturing in South Australia he'd put up risk capital for small suppliers (the foundry churning out the rear-vision mirrors, for example). His sons were chinless wonders given to lairising around the streets in British sports cars. The second and more common archetype wore filthy overalls, shorts and army boots. His office was a corrugated iron shed or nothing at all. No telephone. Deals were completed on the personal level with a handshake and tenners stuffed into a hip pocket. Beginning with an Avro Anson bought with back-pay he personally removed easily saleable items—landing lights, sheets of aluminium, the bucket seats—and then the other less accessible parts. The huge radial motors were pulled down to isolate the block of aluminium alloy. About halfway stripped, the hulk had paid for itself. Then onto the next. Turnover became the trick. An aeroplane rarely left his hands intact. A lotta hard work. Often they dabbled in digger spades and enamel plates on the side. But at least you didn't answer to a boss. Such a dealer in scrap had grazed shins, stubborn eyes; a face already half worn out.
    The former group