Death of a River Guide (11 page)

Just when you thought you had heard them all there was a new story, but of course that always led back to old ones, which you seemed to learn not through desire or determination but through sheer repetition. Sometimes Harry would talk of his days upon the rivers, and the stories grew bigger and Harry more animated in their telling and these stories in particular entranced the young Aljaz.

Of course there were no roads to the Franklin and the Gordon rivers and it was almost impossible to get to such remote country, but when Aljaz was seven Harry took him along on a trip to Strahan and from there by steamer across Macquarie Harbour to the lower reaches of the Gordon River. There Smeggsy and two others were camped, reworking some of the old pine stands upon the Gordon's bottom reaches. Harry and Aljaz stayed with the piners for two days and nights in the humid rainforest, living at the edge of the great steel-black waters of the river. The piners drank strong tea sweetened with immense amounts of sugar or condensed milk and talked of how there was no money left in the game, of how they were the last pining gang on the rivers; talked of how it was all changing, of how not only the river people but the rivers themselves were doomed, to be dammed forever under vast new hydroelectric schemes and already there was bush work to be had cutting exploration tracks for the Hydro-electric Commission's surveyors and geologists and hydrologists. They talked of Old Bo and swapped innumerable stories of his many feats, including his last and possibly his greatest, certainly his most celebrated, when he and Smeggsy had rowed Harry from the Franklin through to Strahan in twenty-four hours, only for Old Bo to die of a heart attack just as their punt rounded the point and Strahan came into view. And as we too returned to Strahan aboard the steam tug, a long raft of Huon pine logs caterpillaring behind in the choppy waters, Harry told a story about every point and every cove and every island.

Stories, stories, stories. A world and a land and even a river full of the damn slippery things.

After Adie went away I can see that at primary school Aljaz makes a point of succeeding. And I can see it does him no good. The teachers find him too trying and too challenging. ‘He's smart all right,' Aljaz overhears one teacher tell another, ‘but it's a quirky smartness. Undisciplined. More rat cunning than intelligence. If you know what I mean.' Young Aljaz doesn't. I can see the boy doesn't understand the immediate meaning of these words, but that he gets the message nevertheless. To the teachers he is a smartarse. At high school he makes a point of failing at everything. But only after he has made a point of showing the teachers that he is smart. Only after he writes a good story. Or does all his maths quickly and correctly under the eye of the teacher. Why? wonder his teachers. Here within the river it is hard to see exactly why, but even through the thousands of litres of water rushing over me one thing is abundantly clear: by failing Aljaz begins to fit in with people. I watch him quickly come to the conclusion that success brings only contempt, whilst there is a camaraderie amongst the ranks of the fallen. The high school is new, set up for the vast housing commission suburb nearby that is rapidly filling to overflowing with young desperate families. The children of these families by and large expect life to give them nothing. They expect to be failed. By and large they expect to be unemployed, to be pushed around, to know only despair. So the honourable way to survive in the school is to make a cult, an artform, of failure. And if you are good yet insist upon failure, then so much the better. There are the heroic failures such as Slattery, who wins his place in the school running team with ease, and is a favourite to win the 400 metres at the Tasmanian high school championships. At the championships Slattery wins his heat in the fastest qualifying time. In the final, at the 300-metre mark he is ten metres clear of his nearest rival. He suddenly halts and starts running backwards through the pack of runners behind him, emerging triumphant at the wrong end of the race waving his long arms in triumph to the crowd of the school's supporters. The teachers are outraged and perplexed as to why the children cheer and laugh until the tears run down their cheeks. But only the children understand that to win is for Slattery to participate in a lie that everyone in life has a chance of winning if they try hard enough. By losing so spectacularly, by turning his loss into a triumph, he has turned their collective fate into a celebration and a challenge to the teachers, who could not begin to comprehend what it all meant. They ask Slattery why, but Slattery can not put words to his actions, any more than the children can explain why, at that moment when his long legs began to move backwards into the mêlée behind him, they felt such a sense of euphoria. They only know that for one moment in their entire school lives they had posed a question about the injustice of their destiny, and the adults had not only not known the answer, they had been too ignorant to understand the question. But none of it can be put into words. And nobody tries.

The small boy is not a heroic failure like Slattery. He is one of the many quiet failures the school gladly rids itself of at the end of his final year.

Young Aljaz, now out of school and without work, looks at the photo of Harry and Auntie Ellie that sits on the mantelpiece. It doesn't mean much to him. None of his family or his forebears means that much to him, and he takes a certain pride in how little he knows about them. Such photos sit in dark recesses in dark dusty rooms. And Aljaz was never one for being about inside, poking around in this and that. Inside is where Harry now spends most of his time, more often than not drinking in the company of Slimy Ted, who, after he had his cray-fishing boat impounded by the authorities for poaching, more or less stopped working. Aljaz was one for getting out and doing, and it didn't matter much for a time whether the doing was good or bad, just so long as it seemed to pulse with the thick bloodbeat of life. Until the doing became the undoing of Aljaz, and the police came with their blueys, their blue-papered summonses, and Aljaz had to go to court again and again for being drunk and disorderly and drunk and incapable, once for drink driving, and once, though it really had nothing to do with him because he was only hanging onto the girl's handbag, possession of marijuana. And then the judge said that if it didn't stop, next time it would be jail, and Harry looked up from the game of crib he had going with Slimy Ted in the kitchen, put down his beer glass, took the cigarette out of his mouth, and said it had to stop and that the doing had to find other forms.

The doing became football, for which Aljaz had always shown some aptitude, but which his school's philosophy of losing had prevented him from ever shining at. He started training with the South Hobart reserves and by mid-season was regularly getting games with their senior side as a rover. With the senior games came regular money, and this meant considerably more to Aljaz than all the talk of the club, which others used to gabble about. The fans loved Aljaz, the way his long mane of flowing red hair would suddenly appear out of nowhere to be alone leaping into the sky, and they called him the Red Panther and the Great Cosini and Ali Baba. The newspaper dubbed him Fellini Cosini because of his cinematic marks, and opposing teams' fans took to chanting, ‘Eight and a half, eight and a half.'

I observe that I was happy then, in the fashion of those who know that happiness is as transitory as the clouds. My mind stops seeing and returns to thinking, my thoughts like persistent pigdogs who have run their prey to ground, refusing to let go, demanding that I answer their insistent question.

Why did I take the job?

From my present point of view, the perspective of the drowning man, drowning in consequence of having taken the job, this question is not without importance. My decision to take the job, to put myself on the train of events that would lead to my present fatal predicament, must be one that betrays what is self-destructive about me. Or at least what is flawed. Why did I take the job? Well, Pig's Breath rang, and what was I to say?

After so many years I had finally returned home. I was so glad to be back. But my happiness soon turned to dismay. Wherever I went I heard the same refrain: so-and-so has crossed the water to the mainland to get work. There were no jobs, but then, as friends pointed out when I became downcast about the subject, there never had been. The island had been depressed for a century and a half. I had been back for a few weeks and not a sniff of work, but then what the hell did I expect? I was a sick man too. Not badly sick, not life-endingly sick, but sick all the same. I seemed to have acquired a permanent form of mild dysentry and my belly felt soft and watery near enough to all the time. I got bad headaches, my hair came out in tufts so bad I had to get it cut back short as buggery; it then went all spiky and I looked like some crazy red razorbacked pig. Truth be known I felt rotten, felt so bad I'd find myself crying for no explicable reason, found myself weeping just watching news of some disaster on the TV or hearing a mother shouting at a kid on the street. I needed something real bad, but I didn't know where or what or who it was. So Pig's Breath rang, and what was I to say?

Why did I take the job?

Everyone knew how much I disliked raft guiding. It was one of my inexhaustible conversation topics. I seemed never to tire, particularly when in the company of other river guides, of telling all who would listen what an appalling job it was and how glad I was at long last to be out of it. I didn't say that I had once loved it. I did say that the pay was terrible and getting worse, the conditions those of nineteenth-century navvies, the customers - referred to derisively by everyone in the trade as punters - fools or oafs or both. Raft guiding was all right if you were young and had nothing better to do, I was fond of saying, but it was no job for anybody over twenty-five.

And I was thirty-six.

And yet, when Pig's Breath rang, before I had time to say a word, I felt the old excitement come back.

I wanted to do one last trip.

And, I suppose, it has to be admitted, there was the matter of Couta Ho. Without meaning to I walked around to her place on my first day back home, but I couldn't bring myself to go inside.

I see her now at that party, all of twenty-three, standing close to Aljaz, he three years younger, throughout the evening that they first met, all those years ago. Each time he went into the kitchen to get another drink, he was aware of her eyes following him. He had never been desired in this way, so overtly and so sexually. It frightened him. He had dreamt of such things and fantasised about such things, but when confronted with the reality he felt an unease so great that he thought nothing good could come of it. He asked Ronnie if he wanted to go, now that the party was beginning to die away. ‘Go? Why? There's still beer to be drunk.' He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the lounge-room. ‘And I think someone's got you booked for the evening.' Aljaz felt a terrible embarrassment. He knew how to cope with girls giving him the flick - at that he was expert - but a girl chasing him, well, that was unnerving. He went back out to the party and joined a circle of people on the opposite side of the room to where Couta Ho was talking to some friends of Aljaz's. He had only been there a moment and she was back at his side. She was smoking furiously, though she only rarely smoked, talking ten to the dozen, and Aljaz, to hide his nervousness, joined her. He did tricks with smoke coming out of his nostrils to make her laugh, and as she relaxed, so did he. And when he leant down - for she was smaller than he - to show her another trick and took the cigarette out of his mouth, he felt her lips upon his. He felt his lips respond and then open, and felt her tongue leap into his mouth like some smoky damp fish. He felt himself falling and momentarily staggered as he readjusted his weight to take hers, then in response to her same gesture, put his arm around her and he felt her flatten into his body.

In the end it was four-thirty in the morning and there were only five other people left, two of whom had flaked in the kitchen, one of whom, Ronnie, was still awake but only just so, swigging the dregs from a bottle of brandivino as he lay in the bathtub humming an Abba song, while the remaining two were coupling fully clothed on the carpet, dry humping at the edge of the lounge-room, occasionally rolling in their drunken, languorous passion into a half-empty bottle and spilling beer or cider over themselves. Neither seemed to notice, or if they did, showed no outward signs of caring. Aljaz's head ached and he was totally confused as to whether he ought stay or go. He and Couta Ho had been passionately embracing on the lounge suite for what seemed an infinity and Aljaz was unsure as to what the next stage was, and recognising that he had neither the experience nor the energy to make a decision, announced that he'd better take off home. Couta Ho, and not for the last time, shook her head, took his hand, and led him into her bedroom.

He had not known it would be like this. He had expected that somehow he would initiate and lead, make the big and vital decisions. And now knowing that this was not expected of him, that she wanted him and his body urgently and would lead him through the mystery of what remained of the night, he felt a curious relief. When he joined her in the bed, and when he felt her naked body next to his, when he smelt the ocean rising up from her thighs and when she guided his hand downwards to feather through that ocean's wonders, then he found himself possessed of a tenderness so exquisite and gentle that he felt afraid she was unlocking parts of his soul that had until then been hidden even from him. Aljaz marvelled at how his body, a few moments previous loose and without purpose, now entwined so powerfully and fiercely with that of Couta's, marvelled so much that he no longer saw her body or felt his own, but thought that they had been transformed into two strands of some strangely animated steel cable, a writhing tautness, that was at once still and moving, twisting, enwrapping and springing off the other's sinuous strength. It was a battle and it was a dance, and where she led he followed with such a provocative purpose that he found his body responding to her desires and not his. He no longer thought of nor cared for himself, but was lost in her pleasure and he was grateful. She simply wanted him to
be
, not to do. She began to sigh, and each sigh he felt as a rush of hot petals tumbling over his body and he felt a great rising emptiness, which overwhelmed him so completely that afterwards he found himself shivering with an unnameable anxiety.