Ghost River (5 page)

‘You just told us to piss off,' Sonny reminded him.

‘I was mucking round.' He smiled, front teeth missing. ‘Name's Jack.'

If he was waiting for the boys to introduce themselves it would be a long day.

‘We have a load of chairs in the back of the truck, and my mate, Henry, and me, we want to get away. You give us a hand and there's an earn for you. A couple of bucks each.'

‘How much is a couple?' Sonny asked.

Jack held up two fingers. ‘Same as it's always been.'

Sonny held up four fingers. ‘Two's not enough. It's Sunday. We work double time, same as you.'

‘Jesus, you running a union here? You're not getting four. Three dollars each.'

‘Only if you pay up front.'

‘Bullshit! Nobody gets paid up front. Not in full.'

‘Then we're not doing it.'

Three dollars is good money
, Ren thought. He wanted Sonny to shut up and take the deal.

‘Fuck me. Next time I'm chasing a pay rise, I'll give you a call,' Jack said. He dipped into his back pocket, pulled out his wallet and paid the boys three dollars each.

The chairs were made of solid wood and were heavy. The boys struggled with two chairs apiece, one under each arm. They followed the removalists through the house – it smelled of fresh paint – and crossed the backyard into the open door of the stable. The walls were painted white and the wooden floor had been sanded clean. Ren looked down at the boards, marked with deep scars. The piano sat at one end of the room, next to a brass cross atop a wooden pole. Picture frames rested against another wall. They reminded Ren of the prayer cards the fake Salvos had given out on street corners, except these ones were bigger. He read aloud the gold lettered inscription running across the bottom of one of the cards.
There Can Be No Being Before God, As God Has No Mother.

‘What do you reckon that means?' he asked Sonny.

‘Fucked if I know.'

One frame was covered in a piece of green cloth. Sonny pulled it away, revealing a portrait of a man in a dark three-piece suit, a round-collared shirt and spotted bow tie. He had shining black skin and wore a pair of round sunglasses that hid his eyes from view. He was seated in a carved wooden chair. A young woman in a white wedding dress knelt alongside him. She held the man's hand in hers and looked up at him, smiling. She had golden curls, flowers in her hair and skin as white as his was black. Across the bottom of the painting were the words
Father Jealous Divine & Mother Purity Divine – the Younger.

Jack whistled and called out to his mate on the other side of the stable. ‘Henry, take a look at these stagers.'

Henry was lining up the chairs in straight rows. He shuffled across the room, picking at his arse through his overalls. He stood next to Jack, folded his arms and studied the painting with his head tilted to the side, as if he was an art expert.

‘She's not bad looking, Jack.'

‘Not bad at all. See the way she's eyeing the old black boy. I bet he's fucking her. Put my house on it.'

‘If you had a house.' Henry laughed. ‘What you think, boys? The old buck fucking her or what?'

Ren was sure the man in the painting had to be old enough to be the girl's father, if not her grandfather. He didn't want to think about Henry's question at all.

Heavy footsteps echoed across the room behind him. He turned and was frightened by the sight of a tall thin man standing in the doorway of the stable, casting a shadow across the room. The man wore a long suit coat over a white shirt. A silver head of hair sat on his shoulders, and his skin, pulled tight across his face, was lined with pulsing veins. The removalist began rubbing his chest with a hand, as if the man's cold blue eyes were boring a hole in Henry's heart. His face tightened with pain.

The man strode across the room and stopped inches from Henry, who looked down at the floor, at the pair of black leather shoes the man was wearing.

‘Your remark?' the man asked, raising one eyebrow.

Henry flicked his tongue out and licked his bottom lip. He tried getting his mouth moving, but it had seized on him.

‘That weren't no remark,' Jack offered. ‘We were having a joke here with the youngsters. Weren't we, Henry?'

The man set his eyes on Jack, who suddenly seemed as uncomfortable as his workmate.

‘How often do you feel a need to speak on behalf of your co-worker?'

Jack appeared insulted and spoke up for himself. ‘I don't feel any particular need. Like I said, we were just mucking about. No harm done. Is there?'

The man ignored the comment. He took a stiff white handkerchief from his jacket pocket and dabbed at the corners of his mouth. Ren, listening closely to the man's voice, heard an accent.
American
, he thought.

‘Set the chairs in rows, an equal number of chairs per row, separated by a clear centre aisle of three feet. You will move the piano to the right side of the room. You will also need to hang the psalms, and …'

He stopped and looked down at the cloth that had been pulled away from the painting of the old black man. He picked up the green cloth, folded it neatly, tucked it under one arm, raised the other and pointed to the wall behind the piano. ‘Mount the portrait of the Messenger in line with the centre aisle. At a height on the wall.'

He took another step forward and stood so close to Jack they almost touched. He handed the folded piece of cloth to him. ‘Are you able to complete these tasks?'

‘No worries.' Jack smiled. ‘It'll cost a little more though. Mr Beck, weren't it?'

‘Reverend Beck,' the man smarted.

Jack offered his grubby hand. The Reverend ignored it and wiped his hands with the handkerchief. He put it back in one coat pocket and took a small black leather Bible from another and held it in one hand. He opened the Bible and ran his eyes down the page before suddenly flicking them to one side.
As sharp as a bird in the sky spotting the prey it was about to snatch and kill
, Ren thought. A girl had appeared at the stable doorway. She wore a long chequered dress reaching to her ankles and a scarf on her head, hiding most of her blond hair. She was around the same age as the boys. Ren snuck a look at her face. The girl glanced at him and just as quickly, for only a moment, before turning away.

‘Della,' the Reverend said, ‘what are you doing in here?'

She answered by bringing her hands together in prayer. ‘The followers have arrived and they are asking what work you need them to do.'

The Reverend spread his arms, raised his hands in the air and closed his eyes. ‘There is work for them in our church. Return to your mother and ask her to escort them here.'

Jack and Henry were staring at the Reverend as if he was a freak. Sonny caught Ren's eye and nodded in the direction of the stable door. As the boys slipped past the girl, Ren stole another look at her and decided on the spot that she was pretty, even though half of her face was covered by the scarf. Her skin was as a clear as the young bride's in the painting except for the dark rings under both eyes, which gave her a look of deep worry.

Ren followed Sonny through the house. A thin woman stood in the middle of the kitchen wearing a uniform similar to the young girl's. She wrung her hands together and said nothing as the boys walked by. In the next room a group of men, dressed similarly to the Reverend, were gathered in a circle. They had their heads bowed in prayer and did not look up as the boys passed the doorway. Once they were out in the street the boys began firing questions at each other.

‘What a nutcase,' Sonny said. ‘Did you see his crazy eyes?'

‘The black man in the picture? He didn't have eyes. Just them circles. His glasses.'

‘No, I mean the Reverend fella. They are the eyes of a killer, for sure. He was so white he looked like someone had stuck him in a freezer for a week. He had a strange voice. And the girl, she was afraid of something. I could see it on her face. Come into the yard with me. We can sneak a look through the fence.'

Sonny was peeping through a hole in the side fence when the back door swung open. It was his father. His hair stood on end and he was wearing only a pair of stained underpants. He didn't look at Sonny or Ren, or say a word as he leaned against the fence. He supported himself with one hand, pulled his dick out of his underpants with the other and pissed in the dirt. When he finished, he spat against the fence and shuffled back into the kitchen, scratching at his unshaven face.

‘Sorry,' Sonny said, as embarrassed for Ren as much as for himself. ‘He's been hitting it hard.'

‘It don't matter to me,' Ren answered. ‘I don't care.'

Ren truly meant it. He felt bad about most things that happened to Sonny – his mother up and leaving him, and his father treating him poorly. He wanted to offer words that might help his friend feel better. ‘I have to get home or my mum will kill me. But tomorrow, I reckon it will be hot again. We could swim at the falls?'

Sonny was staring at the open doorway his father had just walked through. ‘Sure. We'll swim at the falls.'

Ren went into the house and up to his bedroom. He took the photograph of the eagle out of his pocket and smoothed the creases in the paper as best he could. He took two drawing pins from a matchbox and pinned the photograph to the back of his bedroom door, where he'd be able to look at it from his bed. He heard footsteps on the stairs. His mother's.

Loretta walked into the bedroom, stood alongside Ren and admired the bird.

‘Where have you been all day?' she asked.

‘Nowhere. Hanging around with Sonny.'

She moved closer to him, sniffed the air and raised an eyebrow. A clear sign she was giving Ren the opportunity to confess that he'd been swimming in the river. He declined the offer.

‘Nowhere, you said. Must have been doing something with your time?'

Ren dug into his pocket and pulled out a one- and a two-dollar note. ‘New people moved in next door to Sonny and we got a job helping move the furniture. Sonny earned the same as me. That's what I've been doing. Working.'

Loretta kept her eyes on the photograph of the bird as she spoke. ‘Is it a family moving in? I hope we get more decent people than the last lot of frauds.'

‘I guess they're a family. But they're strange-looking.'

‘How?'

‘Well there's a girl and a woman, her mother, I guess. They dress strange. Old-fashioned. And there were these men in one of the rooms, praying I think. And one fella who must be in charge. Sonny reckons he looked like a dead man. They're making a church out the back, in the old stable.'

‘A church? Archie won't be happy about that. He's got no time for religion. Are you sure it's a church they're thinking of?'

‘That's what I heard him say to the removalists. He's got a piano in the back and some holy pictures and lots of chairs.'

Loretta took a step closer to the photograph of the bird. ‘And where'd you get this?'

‘In a magazine. I found it laying on the road,' Ren lied. ‘Do you know how they do that, Mum?'

‘Do what?'

‘Take photographs like that. That bird is way up in the sky, but the picture is close. How do they do that?'

‘Oh, they'd be professional people with special cameras, almost like telescopes. Have a look at the photographers on the boundary line next time you go to the football. They use cameras like that.'

Loretta poked a finger through a lock in Ren's hair and stuck it behind his ear. ‘You need a haircut.'

‘No, I don't. All the kids have it long now.'

Loretta frowned. She thought her son looked scruffier than he ever had, but she wasn't going to argue about an issue that didn't mean a lot to her

‘Fair enough.' She laughed, ‘I hate to think you're not up with the trend. I best get tea started.'

She sniffed the air again before leaving the room. ‘I'd swear I can smell the river in this room.'

‘Yeah, it's the wind,' Ren said, faking a sniff of his own. ‘You know, coming off the water.'

Loretta did know. She'd only just come inside from hanging the washing in the yard. She knew a change had blown in and the wind was coming from the opposite direction to the river.

CHAPTER 4

The next morning, Ren sat on the front fence waiting for Sonny. Archie came out of the house not far behind him. It was a warm morning and Archie fell into his chair with a novel in his hand. He held it up for display. ‘Haven't seen you with your head in one of these for months. They have you reading books at school?'

‘I read, at the library. About birds.'

‘And what about stories?'

All the stories Ren needed were told on the river. ‘Sometimes. We have to read for tests.'

‘Tests is one thing. But reading for yourself. You could do with more of it.'

‘I'm busy.' Ren frowned.

‘Oh.' Archie laughed. ‘I can see that. Sitting out here on the fence doing nothing. Waiting for your shadow next door.' Archie tapped the side of his head. ‘Up here, in your head. Books can take you places.'

Ren looked up at the sky. ‘I go places. Plenty of places.'

Reverend Beck came out of his gate and marched by the house. His wife walked several paces behind him, holding the hand of the girl, Della. She looked at Ren a little longer than she had the day before. The family crossed the street and turned the corner. Archie rested the book in his lap.

‘That the new people?' he asked.

‘Yeah. He's some sort of minister. I think they're gonna have a church in the back.'

‘A church? Don't reckon they can do that. Not legally.'

‘They already have. And he's an American, I think.'

‘That's all we need. A fucken know-all.'

Sonny came out of his house, wheeling his bone-shaking wreck of a pushbike. He knew Archie didn't have much time for him. It didn't stop Sonny niggling him.

‘Hey.' Sonny waved. ‘I see you got a book.'

‘You being cheeky, Sonny?'

‘Nah. Just talking.'

‘You read books yourself?'

‘I don't have time for books. I'm busy.'

‘So I just heard. What are you planning today?' Archie asked. ‘You gonna change the world would be my guess.'

‘That's my plan,' Sonny answered. ‘You guessed right, Mr Kemp.'

Archie craned his neck forward and looked up at the shimmering ball of morning sun. ‘If I were you two, at your age, you know what I'd do on a hot morning like this?'

‘What would that be?' Sonny asked.

‘I'd get busy on the river.' He winked at Ren. ‘And I'd get going before your mother finds something for you to do.'

Sonny wheeled the bike between him and Ren. When he reached the ridge above the water, he mounted the bike, took off and held on as best he could down the steep treacherous track to the bottom, the bike bucking and shifting in the loose ground. Ren had warned him that one day the brakes might fail and he'd ride straight into the river, a real possibility that never held Sonny back. His other trick on the bike was to ride it across the slimy ledge of the falls to a swimming hole on the other side. He'd slipped from the bike more than once, and had gone close to falling onto the rocks below, though no accident had ever stopped him trying the trick again.

It was a beautiful morning on the river. The boys jumped again and again from a tree hanging over the swimming hole until they wore themselves out. Ren sat on a low sandstone step at the river's edge. With no wind in the air, the water above the falls lay flat and still as a sheet of glass. He watched as the sheet nudged the falls and shattered as it tumbled over the ledge. Sonny lay stretched out like a cat further up, his T-shirt covering his face from the hot sun. Ren stood up, climbed the steps and collected Sonny's tobacco and papers. He produced two cigarettes, one fat and the other thin, with tobacco trailing from one end.

‘Here's your smoke, Sonny.'

When he didn't answer, Ren picked up a pebble and threw it at him. It missed Sonny, bounced off the rocks and tumbled into the water. He tapped Sonny on the ankle.

‘Smoke?'

Sonny pulled the shirt away from his face, looked up at the pair of cigarettes and chose the fat one.

‘Matches?'

Ren handed them to him and he put the smoke in his mouth, lit it and took a long drag. Ren sat next to him, lit his own smoke and looked down at the water. ‘After we finish here we should call by the camp.'

‘Why?'

‘Check on them. Make sure they're okay. Maybe ask Tex for a story. He hasn't told one in a while.'

‘He's not remembering them so well. He's drinking too much. Doesn't know his own name some days.'

‘He's always been drinking.'

‘Maybe. But not what he's been on lately. I smelled it all over him last time we was at the camp.
White Lady
they call it.'

‘What's that?'

‘Metho and water. I heard about it one time from an uncle of mine, Rory, my old man's big brother. He knows a lot of stuff. He told me that when the winos get desperate they mix the water with the metho to calm its fiery kick. Turns the metho white. Rory said it can
strip the insides of a man's throat, roast his guts and cook his brain.
Send a man blind, even kill him. No wonder Tex can't see proper. And he forgets all the time. He's gone crazy.'

‘Leave him be. He always gives us a seat at the fire. And he shares.'

‘Not hard sharing when you got nothing.'

‘You have it the wrong way, Sonny. Those who have the money, rich people, don't share. Think of the times you've had a feed round Tex's fire. That's his own he's giving us. And don't forget, he found the river long before we did. He knows more about it than anybody, and shares stories with us too.'

‘Tex don't own the river. This is a free country, Ren.'

‘Never said he owned anything. I said he shared.' Ren puffed at his cigarette, held the smoke in his mouth and blew it out. ‘And this is no free country. You're wrong there too.'

‘Course it is.'

Ren stood up, picked up a hunk of rock and shot-putted it into the water. ‘You think so? Get yourself lost on the street late one night and see if you can make it home without police tracking you for a belt. Only way you'd make it in one piece would be through the lanes. If you was lucky.'

‘It's not like we're crims, Ren. They got more to do than hunt kids.'

‘Hunted you when you smashed that window.'

‘Right. But not because I was walking down the street.'

‘Before you come here there was a robbery at the TAB, next door to the paper shop. The robber put a gun to a lady's head and told her he was gonna kill her. The next day the police pulled this kid off the street for it. He wasn't much older than you and me. They took him to the cells and bashed him and the kid died. It was one of the detectives that did it. Foy. You heard of him?'

‘I don't know any detective.'

‘He jumped on that kid, from a table, and killed him. Everybody knew it was him. Didn't stop the judge finding him not guilty. Other police who come to the court to watch the case laughed when it was over, in front of the boy's mother. So don't tell me this is a free country.'

Sonny stood up and waved his T-shirt in the air. ‘I give up. It's no free country. But the river don't belong to Tex. That's all I'm saying. And he's a wino.'

‘So what? There's plenty of winos round here. He's not the only one. Tex is a better person than most of em.'

Sonny stubbed his cigarette butt against a rock. ‘Enough. I said I take it back. Hang on. Let me do better.' He stood up, cupped his hands around his mouth and screamed along the river valley. ‘Old Tex
…
is … not … useless.

‘That'll have to do. You want a statement from me you'll have to belt me with a telephone book and wet towel.'

‘If I was police, I would. After that I'd drop you at Snaky Bend, from the divi-van, give you a crack and let you walk home in the dark.'

By the time they'd rolled and smoked another cigarette the hot sun was directly overhead. Ren climbed the tree and dived into the water. He was the cleaner diver of the two boys but couldn't get near Sonny when it came to bombing. After half-a-dozen more dives he stood in the sun drying off, examining the hairs on his arms, covered in a sprinkling of fine dirt. It was also in his hair, his ears and under his fingernails.

Sonny stood on the bank flexing his arm muscles. ‘Do you reckon they've got bigger? I been doing push-ups every morning.'

‘The only part of you that is any bigger is your fucken head.'

Sonny went on flexing. ‘That Reverend Beck, you think he's a real churchie? Looks more like an undertaker.'

‘He'll be doing both jobs if he's gonna run his own church out the back. Dead bodies might turn up before long. All I know is he's a creep. Them workmen were scared of him.'

‘The girl too. I could tell by looking at her face.'

‘How?'

‘Because I seen that look before.'

‘Where?'

Sonny ignored the question, picked up his T-shirt and scrambled up the steps where his bike lay. He looked up at a winding narrow pathway that led to a cliff-top high above the river.

‘Hey, Ren, you ever been up there?'

‘A few times. It's a good spot for watching birds. They come downriver from the mountains and fly along the valley on their way to the bay, chasing fish, I reckon.'

‘You and your birds.'

‘You and your dick, Sonny. The diver. He's up there too.'

‘The diver?'

‘Yeah, the diver. I bet you'd like to meet him. Come on.' He skipped ahead of Sonny, who was picking up his bike. ‘You can leave it here. There's only the one way up and down. We can fetch it on the way back.'

‘I'm not leaving this behind. Someone might knock it off.'

‘Nobody would steal that bike, Sonny. Not in a million years. And there's no one round anyway.'

‘Maybe not. I'm not taking any chances.'

‘Please yourself. You're lugging it, not me.'

It was an old railway bike and weighed a ton. The railyards captain rode it around at night, turfing drunks out of empty carriages. The frame was made of cast iron and the tyres would fit a tractor. Sonny had stolen it, hand-painted it red and put new transfers on it. His attempt at disguising the bike was not a success. It looked exactly like what it was, a stolen railway bike that had been painted red. If the yard captain came across Sonny riding it through the streets he'd kick his arse and maybe have him charged. Ren had warned him about it, but Sonny being Sonny, he shrugged and said he didn't give a
half a fuck
about the yard captain, which was true.

By the time they reached the cliff-top Sonny was exhausted. He rested the bike against the trunk of a tree and lay on the hard ground. Ren walked on ahead, to where the path ended.

‘Come take a look at this.'

‘At what? I'm fucked.'

‘I told you. The diver.'

Sonny dragged himself to his feet and walked across to where Ren was standing, in front of a pile of rocks, crudely cemented together. A brass plate screwed into the rocks was engraved with a picture of a young man gliding through the air high above the river. Down below, boats filled with people waited in the water. The riverbanks were lined with faces looking up at the diver.

‘Let me read this,' Ren said, running a finger across an inscription below the image. ‘… as the crowd gathered, numbered in their many thousands, the diver fell through the sky, plunged into the water completing the world record dive. The feat has not been attempted since.'

Ren brushed a cobweb from the plate. ‘In the library, next to the town hall, they have a photo in a frame that this drawing was taken from. And a news story. The diver come here from some island in the Pacific Ocean where they dive from cliffs into the sea with ropes tied to their legs. Twenty thousand people were watching him when he dived here, screaming and crying after he took off, then cheering like crazy when he hit the surface. He was in the nude when he come up, cause his bathers were torn off him when he hit the water.'

Sonny walked a little closer to the edge of the cliff.

‘No one could dive from this high and live.'

‘Well, he did it.'

‘Have you looked over the edge?'

‘Yep. We got to lie down, to be safe.'

Ren got down on his stomach and Sonny lay alongside of him. They slowly crawled to the edge of the cliff. Sonny rested his chin against the rock and looked down to the water and across to the far bank, to the remains of an ancient swimming pool that had been carved into the river decades earlier. Strips of bark, newspapers and rubbish were trapped in the rusted metal frame separating the pool from the river.

‘What's that?'

‘Deep Rock. The same man who put the money up to bring the diver here paid for the swimming pool to be built. People used to swim there every weekend, when the water was clean. A long time ago.'

‘Why haven't we swum there?'

‘It's dangerous. The bottom of the pool is full of broken glass. It was done on purpose to stop kids swimming there.'

Sonny worked up a full gob of spit and shot it into the sky. He watched it fall through the air. ‘Sure is a long way down.'

From where they lay the boys were able to trace the journey of the river, snaking towards the city from the hills in the distance. The wheelhouse and the pontoon lay to the other side of them, and further on, factories and narrow houses along the river.

‘Would you try jumping from here?' Sonny asked.

‘If I could fly.'

‘I reckon I could do it.'

‘I would bet you that you couldn't do it, except I'd never get my money cause you'd be dead.'

Sonny moved away from the cliff edge, sat on a stump and rolled himself a cigarette. As Ren crawled back to join him, his heel clipped the front wheel of the bike. It rolled forward. He threw a hand out to grab hold of a wheel, but the bike picked up speed and shot by him. Sonny watched, his mouth open, as the back wheel of the bike tumbled over the cliff.