First for 2014 is a reworked job. Greetings all for new year.

Bill


Crossroads
 
i
 
I was standing at the crossroads. Port Fairy.
1986. I was not alone.
 
Two, maybe three hundred people stood at the crossroads
that Saturday night. Milling about.
 
Strange expression, milling. As if we were making something.
Something more than a ragged circle,
 
looking in.
The corner streetlight shone through flicking insects
 
on glistening black skin.
Her headband was not up to the task
 
of absorbing night sweat, righteous lather.
Left hand brandishing a can of VB,
 
right hand dismissing the concerns of a host
of scraggy Commancheros, whose black bikes,
 
evenly reversed to the kerb outside The Stump,
one-eyed the lot of us.
 
 
ii
 
Younger than either the Aboriginal woman
or any of the bikers, two policemen,
 
both sporting blue short-sleeved shirts bearing
crease-marks ironed in that folk festival morning,
 
paced uneasily, making brief eye contact
with anyone speaking
 
but mostly gazed over heads,
expectantly.
 
 
iii
 
 
It had started so simply. Sun had started
to miss the tables dragged out to the front of the pub.
 
From the shadow of the public bar,
A black flash tripped or kicked an unexpected chair,
 
sending it up on two legs, balancing,
before toppling into the neatly parked Triumph Bonneville,
 
which, almost graciously, folded down in the dust.
One glance, instant decision.
 
Off. Up and over the picket fence next door.
Black legs pounding across paspalum.
 
He was over the next fence before
a single Commanchero was at the first.
 
Punters piled out of the pub.
Half a dozen of the least tubby bikers set off
 
across the backyards of Port Fairy
in search of Koori quarry.
 
The rest assembled by their bikes, muttering,
gesticulating, beers forgotten on tables, on grass.
 
 
iv
 
The shaping up at the crossroads might have begun
when one of the Commancheros, suddenly sober, accused:
 
‘That’s his girlfriend. She was in the bar this arvo.’
Or maybe she taunted them.
 
I don’t know. But I was there.
With all the others. Massing.
 
Not at High Noon. But at High Closing Time
At 10 to 11. On a Saturday night.
 
Distant violin and footstomp still, over at The Vic
But folkies are not an incendiary bunch.
 
‘Yaargh, ya weak bastards, all o’yez,’
she spat, before turning and making her way
 
through an easily parting channel of onlookers.
Hairy Commancheros, police, folkers, me. Bitumenised.
 
bw