WHEN FEATHERS FLY
Dr Adam Lewis should have known better than to let alluring Amaalia draw him into the anti-nuclear struggle in remote Torrens Valley. The last thing he needs is to have his refuge revealed to the world.  Despite his reluctance, the American doctor is quickly caught up in the conflict as greenie protestors try to frustrate the plans of State Development Minister Doug Elliott to build a uranium enrichment plant in the Valley.  The scene is set for two opposing world views to collide in outback Australia. The ending of this fast-paced story remains in the balance until an omen revealed in a moment of grace guides Adam’s final move.	In Store Price: $AU23.95  Online Price:   $AU22.95 ISBN: 1-9211-1818-0 Format: Paperback Number of pages: 201 Genre: Fiction   Cover: Clive Dalkins
Author: Brian Feeney  Publisher: Zeus Publications Date Published: 2006 Language: English

ABOUT THE AUTHOR  

Brian Feeney was born in Australia at a young age in the middle of the last century.

Now after half a life and more of preparation as a gardener, town planner, husband and father, Brian writes stories that are reminiscent of purple bougainvillea growing rampant over a weathered bungalow.

He lives in Brisbane where he aspires to be better known in eccentric circles. This is his first novel.

1  

When the manager finally got the door open and they saw the body in all its animal extravagance, the murky reputation of motels as places for furtive sexual encounters beyond the righteous limits of the marriage bed was further enhanced and the ghost of Arthur Heinemann given one more reason to rue the day he ever used the word. More than 70 years before, back in 1925, at San Luis Obispo between Los Angeles and San Francisco, at some kind of crossroads on life’s road map, Arthur fused ‘motor’ with ‘hotel’, made a new word and a name for himself as well.

No thoughts of Arthur Heinemann troubled his mind when Sgt Rick Burgess with his partner Constable Ellie Spark burst through that door. Somehow, in the hours since they’d left the Spring Hill Police station, Burgess had managed to deface his fresh blue uniform shirt with tomato sauce, almost certainly from the meat pie he’d scoffed or it could have been the fries (he liked tomato sauce on most things). Looking now like he’d already been in a bloodletting or possibly a shootout, he scanned the scene before him. For her part, Ellie Spark had never met a chocolate she didn’t like. As a consequence, she often spent her early mornings in a jogger’s outfit rather than lying in the arms of her bosom bed-buddy.

The door opened into one of the deluxe suites. The plush red carpet and heavy curtains gave the darkened sitting room a discreet air which was somewhat undermined by the etchings of near-naked Victorian women, pornographic in a more prudish age, which cluttered the walls. Several small porcelain cupids accented with gold paint, incongruously reflected in the facets of the large mirror ball hanging from the ornate plaster ceiling, aimed their arrows at the intruders. There were a number of establishments like this near downtown Brisbane that catered to the adult entertainment trade, motels with decor for the more well-heeled clients, be they members of Parliament away from their wives, local professionals with a taste for young skin, or visiting businessmen with an itch to scratch.

Passing through the sitting room, they saw on the bedroom wall the life-size painting of a pouting young nude displaying her beckoning buttocks and other business assets. The two cops looked knowingly at each other. The bedroom reeked of stale perfume, intoxication, lust and hopeless resignation, emanating from the flesh transactions of the place.

The room was dominated by the large dishevelled bed, red satin sheets flung outwards towards the floor, sloping off the side of the bed like a badly fitting hairpiece and exposing a male body in full display. He couldn’t have been long deceased as signs of recent vitality were obvious, his pose somewhat reminiscent of a mature whaler as he lay on his back, harpoon in the air. So much for the idea that old whalers just turn into blubber. The cops checked the room for any clues to the man’s fate. It appeared that the whales had moved on but a bottle of Viagra had been left like flotsam on the bedside table.

“An old whaler’s best friend,” mused the motel manager, pointing towards the table. He’d seen the two young females check into the room earlier in the night and assumed that their client was too discrete to front the lobby. After that, nothing more was heard of them until the phone call tip-off.

As a team, the two cops – Burgo and Bright to their mates – knew a thing or two about bodies of the dead persuasion. If they’d been so inclined, they might have recalled the words of the novelist Henry James, written for a dead man almost a century before, that the extremity of personal absence had recently overtaken him. In practice, like most of the others, this stiff would go under the knife to check for anything suspicious - suffocation, strangling, poison, whatever it might be.  Burgo sealed the room with crime-scene tape and followed the manager down to the lobby.

Back at his desk, the manager checked the register, his hairless head gleaming in front of a frame around the words ‘God made only a few perfect heads – the rest He covered with hair.’ “Miss Roxy,” he called out to Burgess. “That’s the name she used. Paid cash for the room.” Pretending to be occupied with some papers on his desk, the man added without looking up, “Can’t help you any further, Officer. In this business, it doesn’t pay to ask questions.”

2 (part sample)  

Cresting the ridge, Adam saw the undulations ahead - small granite boulders beneath the sparse cover of scruffy eucalypts with their dull-green narrow leaves already twisting to deflect the low sun’s tropical glare. His body moved forward over the ridge, and gathered speed down the incline. Just his faint intention activated the Nikes, stepping lightly past or over the weathered rocks with their lichen patterns on dull brown blocks, leaving brand prints on the bare beige earth. Muscles moved in smooth response, following a blueprint perfected by hunters in Africa and by the aborigines here in Australia .

Looking around, Adam saw the many clues that reminded him he was no longer in the United States . Only the temperature of the air around his body was familiar from his growing-up years in San Diego . During those times and later as a college student, he would have been with the crowds at Pacific Beach on a day like this, refreshed by the cool water, then sitting on the sand, looking out to the west, oblivious of the Australian shore on the other side of the Pacific Ocean . That Australian shore was only a few hours east of where his jogger’s feet now kicked up puffs of dust.

He made the journey to Cairns from his exile Torrens Valley home as often as he could. For hours at a time he would sit near the Cairns foreshore, looking back across the Pacific as though to his own image on that long-lost San Diego beach, unsure when he closed his eyes, which side of the ocean he was on, except for the gentler swell here in the shelter of the Great Barrier Reef . On this foreign shore, all he could think about was going home, and no return in sight.

The demands of navigating the uneven ground brought his thoughts back to present time. The blood pumped through him. He felt the rush, driving him to move through the land, to drink it in, to leave an imprint on this alien place. The endorphins began to kick in and his tissues hummed a feel-good tune, reminding him of other feel-good times. Particularly with Suzie.

During the past weeks, he seemed to spend the early morning hours around dawn feeling for her in his half-empty bed. Adam was an early riser but no matter how long or how hard his looking was, he could never find her. As he woke each day, he remembered afresh - Suzie had taken her luscious body and hoochy-coochy moves back to Brisbane .

They’d met in Cairns one weekend, she and Adam. They fell into bed together, juices flowing, lusted to the eyeballs. The weekend was over before they’d had time to catch their breath, disappeared faster than a bride’s nightie on her wedding night. Back in Torrens Valley , Adam couldn’t concentrate, phoned her every night, then went back to Cairns the next weekend and convinced her to move in with him, just for a while. They were happy enough at first, carried along on a tide of endorphins and orgasms. Before too long, this wasn’t enough for her; there was nothing much to do when Adam was at work. She began to notice the town and the heat and the flies. “How can you stand this shit-hole?” she’d shout at him when the heat and the flies and the locals got to her.

He put in an air conditioner. Then another. He shut out the flies. She said she was claustrophobic. He took her to Cairns every chance he got. Blind Freddy could see it was never going to be enough to keep her here with him in the Valley.

Then one day a couple of weeks ago, he came home to find the space she’d filled in his life empty. Just a note, Can’t stand this shit-hole anymore. Catch you if you’re ever in Brisbane . Suz.

Adam could see her point, although he didn’t feel the same. He didn’t mind the heat, and the flies were always company when there weren’t any humans around. Sure it wasn’t Rodeo Drive or Aspen or Sydney ’s Double Bay but there was something about this place that got under your skin and it wasn’t just a mosquito’s proboscis.

Slowing down to cross the gully, a small pool all that remained of the rain from weeks ago, he stopped to enjoy the cool shade, sheltering for a minute from the advancing height of the sun.  He couldn’t remember coming this way before - must have taken a wrong turn. The sky reflected in the shallow water, blue against the dirt bottom of the pool. Adam was glad of a drink from his water bottle, pouring some over his neck, the spilled drops darkening the ground around his feet. Two dragonflies flitted around the pool; the brown-bodied one hovering over the water, oscillating up and down as it sucked small gulps of water into its vibrating body. Having refuelled, it resumed a midair coupling with its red-bodied mate. Adam’s own reflection passed across the surface of the pool, the sun lighting up one side of his dark curly hair, young lean face and slightly prominent nose. He looked back at the face, seeing confirmation that his body was here in this foreign place and it wasn’t all just a dream. He was mesmerised for a moment, then startled out of his reverie by the reflection of dark green and yellow wings and a blue head flashing past his image in the water. Looking up, his eyes followed the path of the lorikeets towards the west as they settled on a branch above a rocky overhang.

As he crept closer for a better look, the birds were off again in a moment, screeching to each other. ‘Time to get back’ he thought, but as he turned to resume his run back to town, something caught his attention under the rocky overhang. The outlines of several hands and other forms were marked on the sheltered rock face. Did these hands hold spears and boomerangs before Europeans sailed past this land over two hundred years ago? Or even before Columbus left Palos in Spain in 1492 to find the New World ? These images spoke of totem animals, spirit forms and the rainbow serpent who, in the Aboriginal Dreamtime, heaped up the hills and mountains with the movement of its body across the land.

Adam remembered that aboriginal people had been in Australia for more than fifty thousand years, and before that, over millions of years, this plain would have been above and below sea level in turn as the polar icecaps swelled and shrank. In ancient dry-ground times, this was home to the giant diprotodon, a hippo-sized shaggy marsupial, grazing over the bones of extinct dinosaurs making fossils in the earth beneath its feet.

Feeling he’d got a bit sidetracked, Adam set off again and was soon in his stride. A short way down the track, a figure stepped out before him, the face as brown as a kangaroo’s flank and almost as furry, with thick-knuckled stubby fingers around the AK47 automatic rifle. The man’s narrow-slitted eyes under heavy brows were shaded by a battered ex-army hat that looked like he’d been using it for target practice. His shirt was a ragged scrap, cut for a smaller body than this barrel of a man. He shuffled towards Adam, his bare feet large as dinner plates and almost as flat, carrying the weapon like a favourite toy. ‘Bit like an Appalachian hillbilly,’ thought Adam.

“Don’t want you bastards here,” the man muttered, fingering the weapon.

“Don’t shoot, buddy. I’m just jogging, just passing through here. I’ll be out of your way before you can say hillb – have a nice day.”

“You’re one of those bloody Yanks, aren’t you? Don’t want no bloody Yanks here, no septic tanks, no bloody seppos.” He fingered the AK47 some more.

“Hey, I live here, buddy. Here in Torrens Valley .” Adam took a step towards the hillbilly. “Sure, I’m from the States but I’m workin’ here now. I’m a doctor, you know. In the Valley. Give me a break, OK?”

“Keep back – don’t come no closer. Don’t want you bloody seppos wanderin’ around like ya own the place. Tryin’ ta take our valley. I bet you think all our young sheilas have American knickers – one yank and they’re off.”  He half laughed and then stopped himself, as though remembering that he was supposed to be threatening.

“Now listen, mate. I’m not trying to take anything. I’m just jogging. I don’t want your valley. You must be thinking of someone else. Your sheilas are awesome – I will admit that. But hey, listen, I don’t like to be threatened. You could sure do some damage with that weapon. Where’d you get it?”

“None a ya business. A bloke needs ta look after hisself, nobody else will, not the coppers, no one. I got it from a mate in Cairns , but I’m not goin’ to tell ya.”

“Well, I’m telling you, you got the wrong Yank. I live in town, I’m a …”

“Don’t tell me I’m wrong. I seen ‘em with their four-wheel drives and all.”

“That’s got nothing to do with me, mate. I’m just here jogging and took a wrong turn.”

“You’re all the same, you yanks. Think ya can bullshit us but we’re onto ya.” The hillbilly was getting more agitated.

“Well, you got the wrong Yank, buddy. Like I…”

RAT-ATAT-ATAT-ATAT-ATAT-ATATA.

The land screeched with the echoing discharge of the AK47 as the hillbilly let off a volley of automatic fire into the air. “Don’t tell me I’m wrong! I know what I seen. Now piss off before I shoot a bit lower!”

“Okay, Okay! I’m going I’m going. Don’t shoot.”

As Adam backed away his hands half in the air as if he were in a western movie held up by an outlaw, the hillbilly padded off into the bush on his dinner plate feet giving a believable imitation of a diprotodon.

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