Death of a River Guide (25 page)

‘About thirty bucks, but don't hold me to it.'

‘Well, I got forty,' said Aljaz, which wasn't quite true, but he wanted to impress upon the taxi driver that he didn't want to be messed about.

‘Well, you'll be right, I reckon.'

Aljaz went round to the passenger door and got into the taxi. The metre started counting and the taxi pulled away.

‘Mind if I …?' The taxi driver waved a packet of cigarettes near Aljaz.

‘It's your taxi,' said Aljaz.

The taxi driver lighted the cigarette, inhaled and relaxed considerably.

‘Funny,' said Aljaz. ‘Hardly any money left and I get a taxi. If I had plenty of money I'd be trying to save even more and catch the bus. But when you got nothing, well, it makes no difference.'

‘Poor people are good customers, mate, that's what I say. People say, get the rich ones. I say, fuck 'em. The rich ones never give you cash, always run dodgy credit cards and always want a receipt. And if I want a smoke - no way. Bugger 'em, that's what I say. Why you reckon the rich are rich?'

The question is rhetorical. Aljaz looks out the window. The question does not interest him. He looks at the cars shuffling bumper to bumper along the freeway, looks at the endless expanse of housing, and wonders about the lives of all those who live in those houses and who drive those cars, what it must feel like to be
anchored
, even if it is only to a steering wheel for forty-five minutes every day getting to and from work. And then he wonders if perhaps they are maybe all like him. What if they were? What if nobody was anchored but everyone pretended to be? A panic arose within him and quickly reshaped itself as his old fear, this time scared of this new thought. What if nobody knew where they came from or where they were going? For the first time in many years he sensed that what was wrong with him might not be entirely his own fault, or capable of solution by him alone. But it was only a fleeting sensation that had passed almost as soon as he was aware of it.

‘Why, you reckon?' asks the taxi driver, repeating his question, throwing his left arm about in a gesture of contempt. ‘Why you reckon the rich are rich?'

‘God knows,' says Aljaz finally.

‘They're rich for the reason they're bad payers and mean as shit, that's why the rich are rich. Because they're arseholes.'

Aljaz turns and looks at the taxi driver, shrugs his shoulders and goes back to looking out the window. He wonders why he isn't rich if the only requirement is that he be an arsehole.

‘I've had 'em all in this cab. All the big names. All mean as shit.' Aljaz continues looking at the houses and for no reason that he can name, bursts out laughing.

Maybe, thought Aljaz, just maybe everybody else was also on the road - from the beats through to the hippies to the yuppies to all the arsehole careerists of today, from me to the taxi driver, all of them and all of us seeking constant flight from our pasts, our families, and our places of birth. Even if we travelled in different standards of fashion and comfort. And maybe all the rest of them were as wrong as I was, thought Aljaz, and maybe it was time to walk off the road and head back into the bush whence we came.

At this point the Tasmanian tiger halted, her strange story complete. I feel dumbstruck. How could a bloody weird wolf know so much about me? About what I was thinking and feeling back then? But, as with everything else I have wanted to pursue since I first started having these visions, my mind is suddenly rushed off elsewhere before it is finished with the subject at hand. There is the sound of uproar, and the other animals, less enamoured of and interested in this story than me, are again becoming raucous, having broken into a supply of Harry's home-brewed stout that the oak skink has found. The black cockatoos are levering the bottle tops off with their big hooked beaks and it's on for one and all. With one of his powerful purple-green pincers the freshwater lobster wrests the green-handled kitchen knife from the echidina, who had been hoping to speak, bangs it as if it were a gavel upon the table, and in spite of many of the animals paying not the slightest heed, proceeds to tell a second story.

Madonna santa!
I don't believe this is happening - but I must stop thinking because the lobster is already into its story and I am no longer sure if it his story or my vision, and if I think any more I'll miss what he is telling the others.

 Harry, 1946 

As they came down the river in the drizzle, Harry lay beneath the oilskins in the damp pungency of the Huon pine-planked bottom of the boat, the pain growing and growing until Harry had no existence beyond the pain. Anything else was just a small comma in his sentence of pain. With each pull of the oars the fire flared in the stump that had been his thumb and the flame consumed his hand and leapt up his arm. And every so often he would open his eyes and there would be the sea eagle, the same bird he had seen above Big Fall with the two tailfeathers missing. When Harry's eyes opened the bird would be staring down at them from a tree on the riverbank, and then it would fly off, only to be back when Harry next opened his eyes. Harry no longer knew if what he was seeing was real or a dream. He remembered Auntie Ellie telling him the story of a sea eagle plucking a baby out of a paddock up Port Sorell way, then flying out to sea with it, and how it had raised the baby in its nest on Three Hummock Island far out in the strait. She believed the story. Harry neither believed nor disbelieved, he simply listened. And remembered.

At Double Fall and Big Fall, they had to portage the punt around rapids, while Harry staggered alongside, wrapped in a shivering grey blanket. As they rounded into the Gordon River the rain began to bucket down and the river became curtained in low-lying mist that rose and fell and swept as if swirled by an invisible hand. The beginning of a fever gripped Harry, and the fire in his hand and arm sweetly warmed his entire body.

Harry drifted in and out of sleep. At one stage he pulled aside the blankets and oilskin that covered his head as well as his body and looked up at Old Bo and Smeggsy, each with an oar, Smeggsy on the right, Old Bo on the left. He looked at their legs, at their trousers, heavy with the wet, falling from their knees in folds, thickening out onto their boots. He looked at Smeggsy's thin hair, sitting wet and shiny black, flat upon his head. Old Bo wore a grubby green beanie that was covered with a white fur of water that looked like the mould upon an old lamb chop. He looked up at their stubbled, lined faces glistening with rain. The faces were unmoving, save for the occasional beads of water joining into a necklace of droplets that snaked down the grooves around their cheeks, and from there dripped onto their grey flannels. Their eyes were bright but empty, focused on some distant point to ensure they kept the correct line down the river. The rain spiked the river's surface. Harry fell back asleep and he dreamt that he was in a boat being rowed through the rainforest canopy by two ancient myrtle trees that bore the faces of Old Bo and Smeggsy.

They reached Sir John Falls late in the afternoon and went up to the old tourist hut where there was always kept a store of dry firewood. Old Bo lit a fire and made a billy of tea. They sat around and drank the tea in their chipped enamel mugs, drank it sweet and black, pondering whether to stop there the night. Harry said nothing. For one thing he was too much fevered; for another, in his few moments of lucidity, he felt it wrong to ask anything more of these men who would lose a week or so of work rowing to Strahan and then back up to their camp in the rainforest simply to help him. In the end he curled up like a dog in front of the fire in his blanket. He realised he was shaking bad, that his body was wildly convulsing and dripping sweat, while all the while his mind felt becalmed in the eye of the storm that had taken hold of him.

‘The boy's buggered,' said Old Bo.

And that was that.

They walked back down to the punt, bailed out the rainwater, made Harry comfortable in the stern. The rain had for the time being ceased and the mist lifted. The sun sank before them as they rowed down the Gordon and Harry felt its final rays as a brief warm weight upon his eyes.

‘Forty-five miles to go,' said Smeggsy.

‘Piss it in before tea,' said Old Bo. They all laughed, even Harry, then no one spoke as the stillness of the night came upon them. Above him Harry watched the thin ribbon of stars shining, framed on either side by the rainforest. He fell asleep and again dreamt of being rowed by two myrtle trees, except this time they rowed through the stars to the moon, and it was quiet, and while everything went on forever the stars were as knowable and as safe and as comforting a world as that of the rainforested rivers.

They rowed past Butlers Island, past the Marble Cliffs, then for long silent hours down the long straights, past Eagle Creek, past Limekiln Reach - where the barefooted starving convicts had once been stationed in the rainforest to burn lime - around Horseshoe Bend and out to the mouth of the river, where the river valley was swamped by the immensity of Macquarie Harbour. The moon had risen, a three-quarter moon that silvered the sky and sea, the flat sea, not a ripple upon it. They rowed to Sarah Island where the infamous convict settlement had been a century before, from where men had bolted only to have to resort to killing and eating each other in the bush, before they too died, their skeletons left to bleach and slime and entangle and entwine with the growing myrtle roots. They pulled into Sarah for a break. The moon was at its highest. The two men walked stiffly and awkwardly up to a small clearing in the blackberries used by local daytrippers. Harry slept on in the boat. Old Bo made the tea like a honeyed tar.

‘Christ knows, I need something as bad as this to keep me going,' said the old man as he ladled the sugar into the billy.

‘Twenty miles to go,' said Smeggsy, ‘if we go direct.' Smeggsy wanted to cling to the shoreline lest a big sea blow up and swamp their small boat in the middle of the harbour, but it would extend their trip by another seven miles. Old Bo smelt the air and gazed at the stars.

‘We go straight,' he said at last. ‘No wind till mid-mornin'.' They drank the billy dry, then made another, and then another before their thirst was finally slaked. Smeggsy lay back on the earth and closed his eyes.

‘I could sleep for a million years,' he said.

‘Sleep as you row,' said Old Bo, kicking him in his side. ‘For Chrissake, don't fall asleep here.' They stood up and pissed on the fire to put it out, and as their urine fell in a steaming arc they rubbed their hands in it, to make their hands tough yet supple for the rowing. Smeggsy's hands were pink with the loss of skin from the friction of the oar, and the urine smarted. He shivered. They walked without enthusiasm, with the gait of exhaustion, slow stumbly steps back to the punt.

Smeggsy closed his eyes now as he rowed and he wasn't sure if he was rowing, or whether he was simply dreaming he was rowing, so established had the dull pain of movement become to his body. Old Bo's eyes never closed. He kept the boat on its course across the inland sea to Strahan. Somewhere out in the middle of that sea, Old Bo began to tell stories, strange wonderful stories, and Smeggsy's eyes opened and as he listened he suddenly felt wide awake, so awake his mind left his body that rowed like a slow steam engine and entered the world of Old Bo's stories, a world where past, present and future seemed to collide and exist together.

 Harry, 1993