Death of a River Guide (19 page)

The smoke fills my vision. When it finally clears I see the punters gathered round the fire site and Rickie the doctor making a few desultory efforts to get the fire going. It is a dismal affair, for after so much rain even the wood under the fly is wet. The fire in consequence spits and hisses and steams and smokes as a thin slink of flame slides in and out of the wet sticks, as if searching for one that will burn. It is breakfast. The morning comes slowly, the light weak and oppressive, the black clouds, though no longer emptying torrential rain, still there, making the bluey-black sky look as though an ink bottle has fallen upon it.

The Cockroach looks at the menu, a typed sheet in a clear plastic envelope, to see what they are meant to be eating on day five. The Cockroach doesn't bother with the fire, but instead cranks up two petrol stoves and puts a billy of water on each; one for coffee, one for porridge. As the stoves busily rumble with the rapid pulsation of the petrol vaporising I can see Aljaz walking down out of the rainforest and onto the riverbank. I watch him stretch and yawn; his body, dry and warm from a night's rest in his sleeping bag, now at odds with the cold and damp.

He checks the stick he put in the bank as a water gauge the evening before. The river's edge ebbs and rises in minuscule waves and he spends some time watching, making sure that his reading is correct. The river is up perhaps ten centimetres on its level of the previous evening. Compared to the five metres it rose over the previous day, it is a marginal increase. Aljaz goes and fetches the Cockroach. They both go back down to the river and look at the gauge. They wonder whether they should try and go through the gorge or stay put. They look at the clouds and try and guess what the weather will do. If they stay put for a second day they will fall further behind schedule. The lost time is not impossible to make up by any means, but it will be hard to rendezvous with the seaplane at the pickup point on the Gordon River. But if the river continues to rise then the gorge will become far too dangerous and they must simply wait, no matter how frustrating it is for the punters, who are already thoroughly sick of seeing their precious vacation days drift away with the rushing flood waters.

‘Should we wait one more day?' asks the Cockroach. Aljaz looks around, surprised that the Cockroach shares his thoughts. The Cockroach laughs his easygoing laugh, his buck teeth protruding. ‘Ah, well. The gods will punish us if we don't wait long enough,' he says. It is a joke and his buck teeth protrude again. The Cockroach notices something. He leans down, squints, and then points at the gauge stick. The river has started to drop, albeit slightly. And at the very moment of the Cockroach's discovery, a single shaft of light cuts through the gloom and illuminates the two river guides as if it were a spotlight. They look up toward the heavens and see that the clouds have parted and some blue sky has appeared. Their decision seems to have been made for them by an ethereal force. ‘Into the gorge on a falling river,' laughs the Cockroach. The two river guides turn and start heading back up into their rainforest camp. ‘The angels have ordered us,' says the Cockroach.

When they get back they find that the porridge has burnt. Derek the accountant apologises. ‘I stirred her twice,' he says by way of inadequate explanation, ‘but I wanted to pack up my sleeping bag.' The Cockroach rolls his eyes, tells Derek he's a moron, and says that he'll make the coffee. He makes it extra strong and black, and the grounds fill Aljaz's mouth. As he sips from his chipped green enamel mug, Aljaz squats on the ground. His guts rumble as the thick black coffee mixes with the fears in the pit of his stomach. His bowels feel unusually heavy. The punters gather round the two river guides like animals around a corpse. They sense that a decision has been made, but no one asks. They murmur in low tones to each other about their digestion or their night's sleep and the little tricks they have deployed to make sure they rest better.

‘I roll up my clothes and put them in my sleeping bag cover and make a pillow of them,' says Sheena.

‘I dig a little hole for my hip,' says Rickie.

‘I sleep in my wet socks and they dry in my sleeping bag from my body heat,' says Derek.

‘I light up me farts and that keeps me warm of a night,' says Otis. The others look around at the big boy-man. Watch his face slowly turn up into a smile. ‘Itsa a joke.' Aljaz smiles. The Cockroach laughs. The others follow.

Aljaz stands up and stretches, rubs his hands over his stubbly cheeks, pulls his Fitzroy beanie off and runs a hand through his thin greasy hair, then pulls the beanie back on. When the laughter dies down, he speaks. ‘If I could just have everyone's attention for a minute.' The low murmuring dies away. ‘Normally we don't set off into the gorge at this sort of level. But as you can feel, the air is warmer than it was yesterday and the rain has stopped. That warm air means the weather has changed round to northerly. That means it should be clear skies for at least the next few days. The river has started to fall and I think with this sort of good weather it will fall real quick through the day.'

Aljaz looks around at the punters, takes one last swig from his enamel mug, then throws the remnant coffee grounds on the fire. ‘The Cockroach and I feel that we would be safe going through the gorge and that maybe we ought give it a crack today. If we do decide to go, we'll only be going as far as the Coruscades today, where we camp at the top of the second major portage. Tomorrow we would go through the rest of the gorge.' Aljaz's statement is greeted with a general murmur of approval. The punters are as sick of waiting around in their tents as Aljaz and the Cockroach.

‘So we're going or what?' asks Marco.

‘We're going,' says the Cockroach. ‘Into Deception.'

 Harry 

I watch Aljaz go to say something but I can't hear what it is. I see Sheena shake her head. I see Rickie begin to move off toward the thunderbox but then he too is lost to my sight as the whole scene fades away. My mind is in any case already elsewhere. I am wondering not about what will happen to them on the river, for I know all too well what fate awaits them. But it's what I don't know that I wish to see. And I want to know how the hell Harry came to be in Trieste in 1954. I mean, it was so out of character for him. After returning to Tasmania with Sonja and me all those years ago he never left the island again, as though Tasmania were a world total and full in itself. Which for him it possibly was. And he never ceased to find wonders within it, new and marvellous for both him and everyone he shared them with. Even as his drinking slowly dulled his mind and dimmed his spirit, as though his body were a lamp and his soul the diminishing fuel, even as his heart guttered in the torrent of drink daily falling upon it, he still found time to express wonder, be it at his bizarre barbeques, or be it in his occasional forays into the bush, fishing and hunting.

I remember the way he used smile. How he would bow his head slightly, as if a little embarrassed. How the corners of his mouth would curl slightly upwards. I remember these things now in the hope of exercising some control over this capricious river of visions, in the hope that it might show me why my father ended up in Trieste. The river, as ever, does not explain. But it does show me some things I never knew.

A vision at first most mysterious comes to me.

The crossroads. Night-time. Sky black. A man in raindarkened trousers and an ancient black bluey coat. Once his father's bluey coat. Now worn and old. And, in the incessant rain, wet and cold. It wasn't meant to turn out like this, I can see him thinking as he pulls the steaming damp collar of the bluey up around his face. It shouldn't have ended like this. Black lapels pulled hard against wet cheeks, ruddy with chill through the small white clouds of his breath that envelop his face.

Whose cheeks? I look harder, closer into the river, scan its fleeing waters intently. And finally I recognise them.

Harry's cheeks. Harry's face, empty of anything save his ongoing belief in fate determining everything and him having no control. Too many deaths and none expected. Him meant for the mincer and surviving and Old Bo not. Auntie Ellie not. Daisy not. Boy not. Rose not. Him meant for the mincer and surviving. But a thumbless man is a man unable to chop and saw and he has to leave his beloved rivers and head wherever work might be had. He travels up to Queenstown from Strahan that morning on the ore train's return run, hoping to pull some work suitable for a one-thumbed man in a pub or bank or store well before evening. But all the employers either publicly said they were right for men, or, thought Harry, were wrong in their private suspicions that a lone-thumbed man was not to be trusted.

Wind blowing hard, howling in the lonesome telegraph wires wet with rain and humming with the desire of people to somehow touch one another, no matter how far away. No matter, thinks Harry. He trudges out of town to the gravel crossroads, hopeful of thumbing a lift with his left hand to the next mining town up the coast, Rosebery, where a cousin tends bar in the bottom pub and might be prevailed upon for an evening's accommodation on his floor and some introductions to places of work in the morning.

He watches the few cars all chug past him without stopping. He had hoped to be in Rosebery in time for tea. And now it is late and he is wet and cold and hungry. In the end a truck heading in the opposite direction stops, an ancient old Dodge driven by a fisherman, name of Reggie Ho, whose boat is stuck in at Strahan because of a big blow-up in the Indian Ocean. Reggie Ho has been drinking and tonight he is going all the way through to Hobart, though not to see his family, who lives there, but to see a girlfriend. Hobart. Eight long hours heading east over the wild unsealed road that snakes its way around mountain passes and along the top of ravines to the other side of the island. Hobart. The big smoke. The opposite direction to where Harry wishes to travel. It's not where Harry is going or has ever thought of going. No matter. Even though until that moment he has never thought of going anywhere near the city, Harry accepts the lift because that is his fate, that's how the dice have fallen. Reggie Ho drives the truck hard down that treacherous lonely windy gravelly track and Harry sits and slides in the cold wet seat, shielding himself from the rain that drips into the cabin as best he can.

They arrive in Hobart clammy-cold well past midnight and Reggie Ho takes Harry to Ma Dwyer's Blue House for a warming drink. There, amidst the steaming wharfies and smoking fishermen and smouldering cops and fuming politicians and numerous bored women who work there, he sights a familiar figure playing the Wertheimer piano. Half drunk or entirely drunk, it's hard to tell, but he's still dapper in his Bidencopes finest, still the elegant professional continuing to play throughout a spirited altercation between a very drunk Scot sailor and a very aggressive local wharfie, that ends up with the wharfie flying into the piano and sending sheet music everywhere. Blood spurts, drinks fall, glass smashes, cries and screams abound. And Ruth just puts his English tailor-made cigarette, flash filter and all, into the ash tray, admittedly with a shaky hand, pushes his red silk cravat back into its proper position beneath his Harris tweed jacket, and gives a crooked smile of thanks to one of the ladies who picks up the sheets of music from the floor and hastily rearranges them on the piano. Ruth dreamingly keeps right on playing, too far gone to recognise that he is now doing two songs simultaneously, playing the bottom half of ‘I'm Gonna Sit Right Down And Write Myself A Letter' and the top half of ‘Drinking Rum And Coca Cola'. Too snakes-hissed to notice the difference, or perhaps wrongly attributing it to what he regards as the corrupting and decadent influence of the new musical fashions, but not so far gone that he is unable to recognise his nephew. Ruth's jowly old face sparks with recognition. ‘Hi-ho, Harry,' he says, his slurred voice somehow managing to syncopate with the unique melody emerging from the chest of the Wertheimer upright. ‘Well, hi-ho. Long time no see.' Harry starts to tell Ruth his story, but their conversation is cut short by Ma, who storms up to the piano cranky as a cut snake and says, ‘Jeezuz, Ruth! There won't be a single bloke left if you play any more of that Yankee bebop shit.' Ma starts humming ‘The Kellys, Jo Byrne And Dan Hart'. Ruth looks back down at the sheet music and manages to focus long enough to recognise his grievous error. Without saying anything, he bursts into an Al Bowlly song. Ma smiles. ‘You not too far gone not to remember a few of the good old tunes, eh Ruth? You remember, don't ya Ruth?' Ruth winks his assent to Ma, who for a moment looks forlornly into the distance, but only a moment, for she spots Harry and Reggie Ho.