Ghost River (4 page)

‘We had a good drink under the palm tree there. Could have been on a tropical fucken island if it weren't for all the noise of the trucks. We finished off the grog and I wished them fellas best and went walking through town on my way to Gordon House for a feed and a bunk. I was going by the department store there. Myer. No good reason why but off I went inside. Ya know, to look at the wristwatches, smelling the perfumes in the air. The women. I took the moving stairs, up and up, to the furniture. Fancy wardrobes and tables. I see this bed with the big mattress on top of the other mattress. Two mattresses. Can you believe it? Would sleep all of us here, I reckon, it was that big. You ever slept on a mattress like that one, you kids?'

Ren answered ‘not me', and Sonny shook his head from side to side.

‘Wouldn't have thought so. Well, I'm standing there eyeing the bed and this young buck comes along with his shirt and tie. Haircut. Shaved clean. Nametag on. Could never forget it.
LEE.
You know, like Lee Marvin. The kid, he seen me looking at the bed and come over. Gonna say
fuck off
, I was thinking. But nup. He points at the bed.
Would you like to try it, sir?
he said to me, like we was both gentlemen. I look down at my dirty boots and ask if I have to take them off and he says,
I'm happy for you to leave them on.
'

‘Must have been looking to get the arse from his job,' Tiny speculated.

Tallboy ignored him and took another drink, emptying the bottle. ‘I said to him,
well thank you, Lee
, and lay down on the bed. None of you here ever felt a bed that way, laying in the clouds there. Then he says to me,
would you like to try a pillow, sir?
And I says,
thank you, Lee
,
a second time.

Tallboy looked around the campfire, searching for a response from his audience while gathering confidence in his story. ‘The next minute he sticks the pillow behind my head like he's my own nurse. Well, I rested my head down and was off to sleep before I knew it.'

Tallboy peered down the neck of the empty bottle. The others, including the boys, waited for him to go on. But he didn't.

‘Then what happened?' Tiny finally asked.

Tallboy lifted his head, opened his eyes and gave Tiny's question some serious thought. Ren suspected that maybe Tallboy was making the story up as he was going along. He didn't mind.

‘Well, I open my eyes and the young fella had a shop girl with him, they was over the top of me, shaking me awake. I'd give a ton of gold dust right now to have that old bed down here. I'd share it with all of you, I would.'

The Doc, who'd been laying across the fire, stealing the heat from the others, lifted his head from the ground. ‘And what the fuck does this story have to do with anything?'

Tallboy looked across the fire at the Doc, with half a mind to choke him to death. He took a deep patient breath and answered in a quiet voice. ‘It's just a story bout a good day I had one time. And a young kid who didn't treat me like shit. That's all it is.' He pointed directly at Ren. ‘It's like these two young fellas here.' He winked at the boys. ‘I see friendship in them.'

‘And it's a good, good story,' Tex said, by way of instructing the Doc to keep his mouth shut.

The campfire went quiet until Tex began humming a tune. The other men quickly joined in singing.

After the boys had left the camp Sonny asked Ren what he thought about the story of the Doc and the mother. ‘You reckon he would have killed someone? He don't look like a killer.'

‘Nah. Not a child. Anyone who kills a kid, and if others know about it, they wouldn't be walking round free. He'd be in prison. Maybe even hanged.'

‘They'd hang him for that?'

‘They hung that fella, Ronald Ryan, last year, for shooting a prison guard. And Archie says he didn't even do it, was the other fella who broke out with him!'

‘You afraid of these men?'

‘Could be. But Tex, I reckon he'd keep them in order with that poker. See how hard he whacked them two for fighting? Anyway, I can't give up the river cause of some old men. It's our river too. And I like the stories they tell.'

The boys would come to know how much the river men loved their storytelling and singing. The only time they went totally quiet was whenever a snoop passed by the camp, sometimes an official from the Water Board, or a fisherman they hadn't come across before. Tex would give the others the nod to go
deaf and dumb
. Anyone passing by who didn't know better would have sworn the men were clapped-out mental cases. And that was the way Tex liked it. He didn't care that outsiders looked down on them. Silence was a valued lesson he learned during his years
away
, a reference to a stint in prison for which he provided no detail, except to say, ‘It was where I come to know to keep the mouth shut and lay doggo.'

CHAPTER 3

Stories of the river were told across the city. There wasn't a child living within reach of the water who hadn't grown up warned away from it with tales of dead trees lurking in the darkness of the muddy riverbed, ready to snatch the leg of a boy or girl braving its filthy water. Rusting skull and crossbones signs, hammered into tree trunks around the old swimming holes, warned of infection. There were also the horror stories of children who disappeared on sunny afternoons never to be seen again, leaving piles of clothing behind on the riverbank, waiting for a parent or the police to discover the telling evidence. It wasn't only children who drowned. As well as the suicides there were the accidents. People fishing fell out of boats from time to time and went straight to the bottom, weighed down by heavy clothes and boots. A dark joke claimed that drowning was a more fortunate end, as eating a fish caught in the river would cause a slower and more painful death.

On calm days, when the current moved slowly towards the bay, and the sun sparkled off the water, it would have been easy to mistake the river's gentle disguise. During Sonny's first summer on the river he decided nothing was going to stop him from going for a swim. He put the idea to Ren, who was less eager. If only half the horror stories he'd heard about the river were true, the riverbed was a graveyard he'd rather stay clear of.

‘I dunno, Sonny, about swimming here,' Ren said, sitting on the pontoon, dangling his feet in the water.

‘I reckon you're scared.'

Although Sonny was right, Ren wasn't about to confess.

Sonny stripped to his underpants, pumped his arms backwards and forward as if he were an Olympic swimmer, and willed himself for the challenge. ‘It's only water. Not much different than diving in the deep end at the baths.'

‘It's nothing like the fucken baths. You can see the bottom at the baths. Here, you wouldn't know if your own hand was in front of your face. Could be anything down there.'

‘Like what?'

‘Like stuff you can't see. You wanna know what Archie calls the trees at the bottom of the river?'

‘What?'

‘When he was a kid they called them preachers.'

‘Preachers?'

‘If a person got caught in the snag of a dead tree and they never came back the family would have to get a preacher to stand over an empty coffin and pray for the life and soul of the dead person. Burying an empty coffin. Fucken spooky.'

The image of a rotting corpse lurking below the surface was enough for Sonny to step back from the edge of the pontoon.

‘I think old Sonny's chickening out now.' Ren laughed.

‘Bullshit, he is.' Sonny let out a screech and dived into the water.

Ren couldn't see any sign of him, except for a trace of bubbles, until he bobbed up halfway across the river, grinning. Ren realised he had no choice but to follow his friend into the water. He stood up, closed his eyes, crossed his heart twice and jumped in. He swam to the middle of the river and flipped onto his back. As the current caressed his body Ren noticed the shifts in water temperature, from warm to ice cold. He trod water and watched as Sonny let the current carry him downriver until he reached the shadow of the iron bridge and headed for the bank. Ren swam back to the pontoon and stood watching as Sonny circled the campsite and searched the empty humpy. He walked back along the track, jumped across to the pontoon and lay his body in the sun.

‘No sign of Tex and them?'

‘Nah. They're probably up at the wine shop.' Sonny was so happy he laughed out loud.

‘What's funny?' Ren asked.

‘This is good.'

‘Yep. It's the best.'

Ren sniffed his arm. The water smelled like nothing he'd expected. It was a rich scent, the same that was given off by the back garden after he'd watered Archie's bed of tomatoes for him. As his skin dried he noticed specks of dirt, fine as baby powder, covering his body. From that day on, the boys carried the river home with them. They went to bed of a night with the scent of river on their bodies and through their hair, no matter how hard they tried to wash it out. And it was with them the next morning when they woke.

In the days after their first river swim the boys couldn't stay out of the water. They explored the banks both upstream and downriver, trying out every swimming hole and increasingly testing their courage, jumping from rocks, out of trees, and eventually off the bridges that crossed the river. Their first bridge jump was from Kane's, a cable bridge that swayed from side to side in the slightest breeze. It was no more than twenty feet above the water, but was challenge enough. Having conquered it they moved on to others, testing their bravery, each bridge higher and more dangerous than the last.

Late in the afternoons, Ren would sneak along the lane behind his house, slip into Sonny's yard and stand under a hose, trying to wash the silt from his body before returning home. If he thought he'd deceived his mother about what he'd been up to, it was only himself Ren was fooling. When he brought the river home Loretta knew immediately he'd taken to the water. She pinched her lip and held her tongue, worrying over her boy as a mother would, but unwilling to crush the free-spirited nature she quietly admired.

The day of their first swim Ren dried off in Sonny's yard with an old towel. It was stiff and felt like sandpaper against his skin.

‘Hey, Sonny, I better wait until my hair dries. I can't go home with it wet or she'll know where I've been.'

Sonny held a thumb over the end of the water hose. Once it had built pressure he squirted Ren in the face with it.

‘We can go to the signal box for a smoke.'

An abandoned signal box in the railyards had become the classroom where Sonny taught Ren to roll cigarettes. Sonny's cigarettes were so perfect, Ren told him that if it was a national sport he'd be world champion. They left by Sonny's gate that day, walked the length of the lane to the railyards, climbed the fence and scaled the ladder into the box. Sonny sat in the signalman's chair rolling and instructing. Ren lay on the floor flicking through the pages of an old
National Geographic.

‘That's your problem, Ren. It's why you'll never roll a decent smoke. You can't concentrate.'

Ren
was
concentrating, on a centre-spread photograph of a large bird gliding across a clear sky. The bird was magnificent. He carefully tore the photo from the book, folded it and put it in his shirt pocket.

‘What have you got there?'

‘A picture of an eagle.'

‘Eagle? What you want that for?'

‘I'll put it on the wall near my bed so I can look at it.'

Sonny was dumbfounded. ‘Look at it? You do some crazy things, Ren.' He lit the cigarette he'd rolled, took a couple of drags on it and passed it to Ren.

A train whistled in the distance, rounded a bend and sped through the yards. Sonny held on tightly to his seat as a diesel-powered coal train thundered along the tracks below him, shaking the signal box from side to side and rattling the windows like an earthquake. The box filled with smoke and fumes. Sonny spun around in his chair and kept an eye on the train until it disappeared around the next bend.

‘Hey, Ren, you ever been on one of them trains to the countryside?'

Ren could hardly see and was rubbing his eyes.

‘I got no reason to. I don't know anyone who lives out of the city. You been there?'

‘Once, when I was a small kid. My gran lived in a town in the bush where my pop worked in a garage fixing cars and trucks. After he died she stayed on in the house by herself. She fell over one day and hurt herself and my mum took me on the train, just me and her, for a stay and to take care of her.'

‘Did you like it?'

‘Yeah, the train had leather seats like big couches, and when I had to go to the toilet it had a hole in the bottom straight down to the tracks. Splattered the shit at fifty miles an hour. Maybe faster than that.'

‘How long did it take to get there, the town she lived in?'

‘Hours. They had a shop on the train for sandwiches and cups of tea. Ham and pickle. And sausage rolls and lollies.'

‘And your gran, what was she like?'

‘She was okay. But strict. She was crazy on keeping everything clean and tidy. I had to wash my hands any time I touched myself and scrub my nails clean with a laundry brush after I'd been playing outside. She could cook better than anyone. When we were there relatives come over and we had a big lunch. She was in a wheelchair, me pushing her round the kitchen, and her giving my mum orders and telling her what to do.'

‘What else did you do in the country?'

‘Not much. There was an old truck rusting away in a shed in the yard. I'd climb in that and pretend I was driving some place.'

‘Where to?'

‘Just places. Anywhere, as long as it wasn't back to the city where my old man was waiting for us.'

‘Have you seen her since, your grandmother?'

‘I don't even know where my mum and little brother went to. My gran could be dead and I wouldn't know.'

He threw the tobacco and papers to Ren.

‘You gonna try one or not?'

Ren did, and rolled a cigarette that bulged around the centre and tapered at both ends. When he finished he handed it to Sonny for approval.

Sonny looked at it in disgust. ‘Fucken spastic.'

Walking home, Ren saw a furniture van parked out the front of the vacant house next door to Sonny's. Two men were unloading cupboards and tea chests from the back of the truck. The house had been empty for months, left to a battalion of cockroaches that moved in after the tenants did a moonlight runner, a pair of con artists who kept Salvation Army uniforms and a tambourine at the ready when they were broke. They dressed up and stood on street corners belting out hymns and passing around the hat. After hearing that police had been knocking at their door while they were out, the couple disappeared one night, tambourine in hand, rattling along the street as they went.

The complaints started when the cockroaches spread from the vacant house and marched into neighbouring homes, including Sonny's. A health inspector from the council was called. He broke the door down with a sledgehammer and trapped a pair of roaches in a glass jar. He then stood out front of the house examining the insects, with a crowd gathered around him.

The inspector took a magnifying glass out of his briefcase, studied the roaches closely and declared that the house had been invaded by cockroaches of the
Argentinian variety
. The landlord was ordered to fumigate the building, fix the leaking roof and clear out the rubbish. The old stable in the yard behind the house, which had been used as a blacksmithing works for years, was also cleaned and given a coat of fresh paint.

The boys stood on the footpath watching the removalists wrestle with a piano. The men lifted it up and strapped it to a trolley, swearing at it like it was someone they were fighting with.
‘Fucken iron frame,' one of the workmen grunted to the other. ‘We're marking the job. Double time.'

‘Triple time. Bad enough as it is, working Sundays.'

They were beaten and stopped for a cigarette. One of the men looked over at the boys.

‘What you two looking at?' he snapped at Sonny, wiping sweat from his neck with a dirty hankie. ‘You wanna try carrying this?'

Sonny folded his arms, smiled and whispered something under his breath, words of cheek the removalist couldn't quite hear.

‘Wouldn't reckon so,' the removalist jeered, ‘you can stop being smart-arses or piss off.'

As far as the boys were concerned the street belonged to them as much as anybody and they weren't about to piss off anywhere. The removalists finished their smoke and dragged the piano into the house.

Sonny stepped into the gutter and tapped the toe of his foot against the bluestone edging. He looked up at Ren and back down at his toe. He whacked it hard enough that it was bleeding. He went on tapping as he spoke.

‘My mum used to play one of them. A piano.'

‘You had a piano in your house?'

‘Nah. She had a cleaning job before she … she used to pick me up after school and take me to this kindergarten where she cleaned, after all the kids had gone home. It was before my little brother was born. I'd lay down in one of these tiny beds, where the little kids slept in the afternoon. Or I'd go in the kitchen and make my own cup of tea while she worked. One time I was sitting at one of the tables, they were tiny too, same as the chairs, and I heard music and somebody singing in the hall next door. I thought it must have been one of the teachers practising for a show or something and went to take a look.'

Sonny stopped kicking, lifted his toe in the air and watched as blood dripped from the wound into the gutter.

‘And?' Ren asked. ‘What happened when you got to the hall?'

Sonny kept his head down and eyes on the injured toe, a ploy to stop himself from looking at Ren. ‘It was my mum, playing the piano, like she owned it, and singing a song.'

The front gate of the empty house creaked. The workman who had told them to piss off was standing at the back of the truck watching them.

‘Do you remember the song she was singing?' Ren asked, only because he could think of nothing else to say.

‘Yeah.' Sonny smiled. ‘It was an old song,
Wheel of Fortune.
She used to sing it around the house too sometimes, when my father wasn't home.'

‘And what did she do when she saw you watching her at the piano.'

Sonny shrugged. ‘Not much. Closed the lid of the piano and picked up her mop and bucket.'

The removalist walked across to where they were leaning against Ren's front fence. He noticed the man had a limp.

‘How'd you kids like to earn a couple of dollars?'