“I explained to her that I was quite happy with everything the way it was and that my chances of ever returning to her or the arsehole of a town she lived in were on the none side of slim. The one thing I did promise to both her and to me, though, was that I’d remedy the divorce situation as soon as I returned to Queensland.
“While attending the wake, I looked closely at the faces of all those who were there that night — those who were still around, that is — they remembered your words. Each of them turned an unusual shade of pale before making their apologies and doing a disappearing act.
“I had no intention of spending even one night in that grubby little town, so I’d planned on driving back to the nearby city that afternoon; my return flight was scheduled to depart early the following morning. Before leaving, however, I made the announcement that, while I didn’t know how Scottie had gone about pimping out my wife during my absence, it appeared that she was back on the market.
“It appears,” I said to a surprised crowd, “that the whore known as Jimmy Brown’s wife will be looking for a new live-in pimp and is looking to expand her business. I’m sure she’d be happy to include any of you ladies that Scottie has been servicing over the past few years in her stable of girls, should any of you be interested.
“I left before the fights started.”
Knowing the town and the area, I imagined that Jimmy Brown wasn’t going to be the only one commencing divorce proceedings after his cousin’s funeral. In fact, I could envisage a few quite large sheep stations being put on the market to satisfy the asset split requirements of the current divorce laws. Money is a great leveller, however, and with the economy being as tight as it was at that time, I imagine that quite a few indiscretions were forgiven.
In the end, it didn’t really matter to me how — or even why — the feud between Jimmy and Scottie had started. It was how it ended that really mattered.
The man I talked with in Cardwell that day was a completely different person to the one I’d known ten years earlier. That man had been shy and retiring. This man radiated the confidence in himself that only those who have tested themselves to the limits and who have won a few fights can ever display. He was still only five-foot-six, but he was no longer skinny. He had bulked out, and he looked to be as strong as a Mallee bull.
I knew that he must now be approaching fifty, but he still had a young man’s facial features. Any woman looking at him these days would see him as being a man in his early thirties who was filled with confidence in his own abilities.
Before we each went our separate ways that night, I learned that he owned and operated his own game fishing charter boat and had clients flying in from all over the world to take advantage of his expert knowledge of his trade. I even met his partner in ‘guts and glory’ — his words — his wife, Michelle. She was a petite lady who was shorter than Jimmy — about five-foot-two (160 cm), who appeared to be in her mid-thirties. She was dressed very modestly but, from what I could see, she had an hour-glass figure. I could tell by the way they looked and touched each other that each of them loved the other more than life itself.