Death of a River Guide (4 page)

‘Then suddenly,' continues the Cockroach, ‘suddenly, some spasm of her muscles made her spew up all this water and they got their hopes back up for a minute. But it was too late. I knew that. Even the bald Pom knew that. She was a goner.'

Now I can see that Couta Ho had understood all this, that long, long ago when she said it would take time to heal but that time could never entirely fill in the hole, that she had said it not because she knew nothing better to say, but because she was right. For a long time I had been sick, and she had found me once and tried to stay with me, still as the moon. And I, like some errant satellite, had drifted away to return only when it was too late. Far, far too late.

 the first day 

I watch the river trip proceed in front of me. On the first day the river was so low they had to drag their rafts most of the seven kilometres down the Collingwood River, to the place where it ran into the Franklin. At such a low level, the Franklin at the junction was also little more than a dry creek bed studded with occasional rock pools. The first day was hard in every way for Aljaz. Physically it was a torment, because the punters had neither the wit nor the inclination to lift and drag the two rafts, each of which weighed hundreds of kilograms, so it was he and the Cockroach who had to do most of the labour. His body was unequal to the hard work. His soft hands burnt from where he pulled the nylon deck lines. His back knifed pain when he lifted the pontoons. They camped at the Collingwood's junction with the Franklin, in the rainforest above a small shingle bank. The night was so clear they slept without tents and Aljaz knew that tomorrow, with no rain, the river would only be lower, their bodies stiff and bruised and their work even harder.

That evening they sat round the fire drinking billy tea and Bundaberg rum and watching the moon, waxing to near fullness, rise high enough for its light to silver the river valley. Their weary bodies felt bathed in mercury. The fire and the banks of rising rainforest were mirrored in the monochrome river as a dancing daguerreotype. They traded stories back and forth, the guides of river lore, of feats great and ridiculous, of floods that awoke them with a roar in the middle of the night, the river banking up around their tent before washing it and most of their equipment away, to deposit it at some point downriver atop a cliff, along with uprooted trees and dead snakes and devils. Of droughts in which the river was so low the rafts had to be dragged along the dry bed for four and five days before enough water could be had to float them. The punters' stories tended to be smaller and sadder. There was Rex from Brisbane, who three months before had taken a large redundancy to leave his position with Telecom and now was totally lost. ‘I am only thirty-five,' he repeated, ‘only thirty-five. What am I to do?'

‘Keep travelling,' advised Derek. ‘With money you can see or do whatever you want. Every spare cent since the divorce I put into travel. What an age it is!'

No one else much knew what Rex ought do, except for Rickie, who said he had a very good broker with whom he could put Rex in touch come the end of the trip. Sheena suggested maybe Rex didn't really have that much to worry about, but the others were more sympathetic.

There was Lou's story of working as a crime reporter on the old
Sun
and being sent to interview a crim who had a contract out on him. The crim lived in a squalid bedsit in Fitzroy and only went out twice a day, once to shop at a Vietnamese store up the road, the other to eat tea at a Syrian café. ‘Why don't you run?' Lou had asked him. ‘Why don't you just do a bunk and go to Darwin or Dubbo or somewhere they won't find you?' The crim sat on his bed the entire time and seemed gentle and pleasant. He agreed it would be the sensible thing to do, but life, he suggested, wasn't always such a simple thing. ‘This is my home,' he said. ‘I live here,' he said. ‘And I'll die here.' So he did. Two days later they came while he was lying in bed and, as Lou put it, vitamised his head with shot.

At the time Lou told that story I had been poking around in a barrrel trying to find another bottle of Bundy and the tale had largely passed me by. But now I think it an interesting story: a man who could evade death chooses against good advice to meet with it on his own terms. Is this an act of cowardice or courage? Of stupidity or wisdom? Of ignorance or enlightenment? I don't know the answer. I wish I did, because it would help me resolve what I am to do, whether I should continue to struggle, or just give in now. This battle of mine, all these strange thoughts and these bizarre visions, why should I hang on to any of them, what does any of it matter if my ultimate fate is only to be carried away by this river as waterborne peat?

But at the point where I most need time to reflect and think, my thoughts are overtaken by my vision. I watch the small solitary camp sleep beneath the vast southern sky, enshrouded in rainforest. Flowing above them and over the valley, the quicksilver river of the night. Aljaz felt the bright moonlight lap at the edge of his sleeping bag. Then, as the moon rose further, the light washed over him, his body a stone too heavy to move in the flowing water of the night. He felt the running shadows caress his body in fluid stripes. He grew lighter and lighter, and heard his body wonder how long before it floated away into the night. In his meandering dreams Couta Ho was upon a beach waving a flag toward him and he was in a boat far out to sea, unable to see and hence decipher the fluttering code.

 the second day 

I watch the moon reach its zenith then slowly fall into the darkness of the pre-dawn hour. I watch the beginning of the morning of the second day, when the river world takes on new colours. And I watch myself awaken.

Aljaz knuckled the sockets of his eyes. He ran his hands down over the roughening skin of his cheeks to join together at his chin as if in prayer of thanks, shaping the flesh into the face that he would wear through that day. He looked across at the tents. No punters up. Across at the fire site Cockroach was up and rebuilding the fire from the evening's coals. Aljaz divested himself of his sleeping bag, stood up and walked down the short, steep track to the riverbank. He pissed on some rocks near the shore, sleepily observing how the steam rising from his urine matched and then merged with the steam rising from the wet black logs of river-fingering fallen trees. He walked upriver fifty metres to where he had set three dead lines the evening before. The first had been snagged by some unknown river creature in a log jam downriver, the second had been snapped, and the third had a two-foot eel writhing like a wild sea snake at its end. Aljaz collected the various pieces of catgut and carried the eel, lashing back and forth, by the line that bore down through its primeval mouth and throat into the remote regions of its gut. There the hook had been irretrievably lodged and there its barbed presence was an uplifting horror for the pitiful creature. At the fire Aljaz with his free hand used a stick to clear a place in the coals, into which he gently laid the eel. The eel twisted and slid as if it were, in its final agony, miming its own swimming movement, for it did not and could not move beyond the hot ashes. As its slimy skin began to smoulder and its flesh to roast and its life juices to simmer, the creature relaxed to a slow movement almost sensual until it began to stiffen then moved no more. Aljaz carefully scooped the eel's charred form out of the fire and ran a knife along its sooty back, splitting the charcoal skin and neatly peeling it away from the sweet steaming white flesh. Upon the rainforest floor he and the Cockroach ate, though none of the punters took up their offer to join them.

Instead they ate porridge, which Derek cooked and which Derek burnt. Two hours later Derek managed to fall out of the Cockroach's raft in a small rapid and become ensnared on a dead tree limb in the middle of the river. Unable to paddle their rafts back to where Derek was stuck, Aljaz and the Cockroach swam down and Aljaz cut Derek's life jacket to free him. The Cockroach helped him swim down the rapid to the riverbank. There the relieved punters beamed and laughed, even Derek. They hugged him and he hugged them, and it was almost as if they were celebrating his fall as a great achievement. The punters looked at Aljaz and the Cockroach with some awe, and both guides knew that now, because of their rescue of Derek, their authority was complete, that anything they said or suggested would be done, taken as gospel, and it frightened Aljaz, this blind belief, like it always frightened him.

‘If only they knew the truth about us,' he whispered to the Cockroach.

‘They've got to believe in something,' said the Cockroach, ‘even if it is only us.' He turned around with a broad smile and slapped Derek on the back and said loudly so that all could hear, ‘We're your ticket out of this slimy hole, aren't we Derek?' Derek nodded his agreement.

‘You won't let us down?' asked Derek, whose fear remained.

‘Only if you burn the porridge again,' said the Cockroach, his smile unmoving.

The second day was hot and the guides sat motionless at the back of the rafts, making imperceptible paddling movements to steer, even their restless eyes stilled behind the reptilian black pupils of their RayBans. They sat unmoving in the glare of the sun, goannas absorbing energy from the surrounding elements, waiting for the moment to strike.

About midday the river, its volume subtly increased by the water of numerous minuscule tributaries, began to deepen enough for them to paddle for stretches of up to a kilometre before having to get out and drag the rafts again. The water lapped at the sides of their rafts as they made their way downriver, the punters sitting sideways, one at each corner of the raft, dipping and pulling their single-bladed paddles through the water. Aljaz rocked back and forth in rhythm with the slow surge of the boat. He thought that perhaps they were not such a bad crew after all, for it was only the second day and already they were beginning to paddle in time. He sat in the middle of the rear pontoon that formed the back wall of the raft, his paddle trailing in the water, acting as a rudder. Aljaz let his body sway and his mind wander as the four punters pulled in long, slow, rhythmic strokes. The day was warm, the sun having finished its slow climb down into the valley to the river. Aljaz took off his cag and thermal, and put on his life jacket and helmet. ‘What's that tree up there?' asked Rickie, pointing up at a bank of dense rainforest.