The Glass Canoe (13 page)

THE KEG AND SIBLEY

I hadn't seen Sibley for a while and no one mentioned his name.

I don't know why I mention him now though I miss having him round, him and his coloured pens and bits of paper. Maybe he's living-in at the university, working his test results up into a book.

The publican came round asking if we'd seen one of his beer barrels. You know, the stainless steel kegs the breweries lovingly send with our nourishing brew tightly enclosed.

‘Was it full?'

‘No. Nothing like that. Just an empty. But I'm one short. Have you seen it, Danny?'

‘I might have emptied it. After that I've got no use for it. Long as she keeps coming through the pipes.' He went on talking, but it wasn't to us.

‘Where'd you leave it?' Mick said.

‘Out the yard, with the rest.'

‘Some kid's pinched it and sailed it down the creek.' Kids rode canoes down as far as the first weir.

After that, they took no notice.

Sibley should have been on somebody's stocklist. They'd have missed him, too.

THE CRY OF CUT GRASS

Tuesday I was back on the golf course sitting on the International, thinking of this and that, my darling, and how the arm of the radiogram or the insides of it knows the record that's on it is just that wide. I tried to trick it with a twelve inch record then a nine inch and a six inch. I was wasting my time. The machine knew. Every time the needle came down in the right place, just on the edge.

When I brought up the subject of records and things, no one ever mentioned how clever the machine was. I used to say something like that sometimes, but no one ever took any notice. Either they didn't realise, or they knew the machine was clever.

I decided they didn't realise.

After work I went to see my darling. She dropped what
she was doing, though I told her to be sure not to interrupt anything important, and ran out to where I was with the car.

I got out to meet her, but before I could reach her she reached the car and kissed his eyes, his front lights.

Once upon a time this used to embarrass me. Now it doesn't.

When I felt like pulling her leg I'd threaten to sell him.

‘You'd never sell good old CLY. Please,' she said. Half was command, the other half question. A third half pleading.

Selling him was not on. He was ten and I wanted to keep him while he ran, and after he gave up the ghost I had ideas of putting a new motor in him or a transmission or whatever was necessary to give him as much immortality as I could. The dents and spots and creases he acquired over the years made his personality shine out. The new front wing I'd picked up in an alley from a guy who said he was a wrecker, wasn't quite the same colour as the original one, and this gave an extra character to his front. As did the chrome piece in the bumper that had snapped off in a collision with a post that wasn't there.

I always felt sorry for the toe on each foot—in both cases the third toe if you count toes as you count fingers—that was bent.

‘When I was a baby the doctor said they should be broken to make them straight. Then they would have been nice to look at.'

She hid them underneath her when she sat on the bed.

This made me feel pretty special towards those toes, as you can imagine. The thought of a little baby having its toes broken by some doctor.

Next day out on the course with the dew seducing me into getting down off the tractor and standing with the sun behind my head so the light shone into the heart of the dewdrops and rayed out emeralds and blinding golds, I thought of her again. And the little bent toes.

It was a day for mowing the rough. In and out the trees, raising a bit of dust later when the dew disappeared, skirting the base of the trees to cut up to the trunks and not hurt the bark and the tree-flesh beneath. To get seventeen hundred revs you had to go back to second. You needed seventeen hundred for the blade speed or you didn't cut cleanly, just bruised and slashed.

And the smell of cut grass rising up all round.

I don't get my kicks out of loud noises—whether it's sound equipment or the scream of turbines—so I always plug in.

I have these little white earplugs, and no matter if the motor's in second, as soon as you plug in peace comes.

You still hear the birds, though, and voices. Just that everything's a long way off. A real long way.

I like that.

Did you know that on a golf course the ladies hit off from different tees, closer to the hole? They haven't protested yet at the inequality.

I suppose I only mention mowing because I remembered just then that most of that day the grass was short and it made you feel a bit brutal to be going round cutting wisps of grass that was dead.

There's nothing like ploughing through long grass, smelling the rich green, knowing the grass grows stronger and thicker for the cut you're making.

I suppose if you put your ear down and listened you might hear the noise grass makes when it's cut, but I don't know that it'd be a cry of pain.

DEATH OF THE DARKFELLA

The Darkfella collected a broken collarbone in the game against Christian Brothers Old Boys, and it set with a lump like an egg an inch or two from where the clavicle meets the top of the rib cage.

It was only a week since he'd been sent off the field for a head tackle. Which was crazy.

The Darkfella was good-natured, spindly and by turns alert and very vague. He was probably in one of his switched-off states when he noticed this winger making for his spot near the sideline and threw out a long arm when the winger ducked inside him. The ref should have used his head, the Darkfella meant no harm and did none. His sleeve got in the winger's eye, and he rubbed his eyes with his sleeve. The ref thought he was blinded or concussed.

The Darkfella was embarrassed and went off grinning, not sure if he was a villain. But when the team cheered him off, calling out things like Killer and Mangler and ‘Take his name, Sir,' he held his head higher and increased the length of his stride, which was long enough already, and loose, so you were never sure where the advancing foot was going to land. He wasn't, either.

I try never to have words with referees. In prison you have to call the warders Sir; in school too; same on the football field.

The Darkfella healed up with this egg near his collar. Maybe it had something to do with him taking the bandages off and wiggling the arm round to show us the way the two ends of bone moved. And he played on with us, usually on the wing. Hoping he didn't get the ball.

His wife left him about this time and went to live with another guy a mile away, leaving the Darkfella's little boy with him to look after. The Darkfella was up the bush one weekend and met a quiet, fair girl, tall as he was, and brought her back to Sydney to live with him while his other wife got a divorce.

After they settled down a bit, the Darkfella got to feeling pretty happy, sometimes even getting full at the Southern Cross. He drank new beer.

The Darkfella had a kerp like no one else. It was fairly long and very thin. When its mind was on nothing
in particular, he could tie a knot in it. Often used to do it in the shower after the game.

One Saturday morning during the season when we had a bye, he was full by about midday, overturned his car at the bend at the bridge end of O'Brien's Road, had enough sense to get out and run like hell to Parramatta Hospital, taking a good short cut through the park. He beat the cops to the hospital and was in bed by the time they dashed in with their breathalyser.

‘What I can't understand,' he said for the hundred and thirty-eighth time, ‘is how they came to get a reading of sober. They said I was sober as a judge. When they asked me where the keys of the car were, I said they'd fallen out. One of them pretended to be sorry for me and put an arm on my shoulder, but I saw his other hand feeling under my pillow for the keys. I had 'em between my legs. Put 'em there soon as I saw the cops walk in up the other end of the ward.'

Next thing I heard, just after the end of the season—we got into the finals, but Clovelly beat us 9-8 at Chatswood—was that the Darkfella was in a coma.

He'd been making a delivery on Captain Cook Drive when a car on the wrong side of the road pinned him to the front of his van. Fifteen days in a coma, and at the end of it pneumonia and death. They always seem to die when they get pneumonia. You'd think they'd be able to pump out their lungs, or something.

His wife that left him stepped in, on good advice, and claimed his body, gave him a funeral and got custody of his little boy. Suddenly found she wanted to look after him.

His coffin lid was open when I saw him last. There was some nice satin, white and shining, and some petal pink stuff—decorations or flowers—and we all followed in the cortege with our lights on right to the crematorium. It was pleasant at the crematorium, with trees and shrubs and flowers, and pools for the fish. And a fountain. You'd never want to leave there. The road in was so straight, there were no gates, no barriers, everything neat and in its place. It was a great place to be dead.

At his benefit night we arranged a few kegs— eighteens—because we were all pretty sad about the Darkfella, and there was roulette and crown and anchor and other gambling games to raise money to send his tall wife back home to the bush.

We made a mess of the eighteens, what with the sadness and the fights that broke out—it was windy weather: the guys fight more in windy weather—but it's only fair to say that the eighteens made a mess of us. Even Serge had beer when the Bacardi ran out.

ALKY JACK GETS SERIOUS

Alky Jack sat talking to himself. I walked over a bit behind him. Yes, still at the benefit party. Out here the dark was much closer. Only a few strung bulbs to keep it at bay.

‘We will go then, you and I, where the pelican shits its nest.'

He'd seen me coming.

‘How's Jack?' sitting on the grass beside him.

‘This world's rapidly giving me the tom-tits.'

‘I'll never believe that, Jack. You love the place. It'll be all they can do at closing time to get you out.'

‘Drink your beer.' He paused to look round at the party. Bodies were all over the grass, the tents set up for roulette, crown and anchor, pontoon.

I look sideways at him, he's looking gloomily into his beer. The whole world's at the bottom of that glass.

‘Reminds me of the twenties and thirties. The economy's falling to pieces, so they clamp down on obscenity, pornography, dissent, loud voices. All they want is populations with their heads down and their mouths shut, so they can patch up a mess that's getting worse all the time. So they want to clean up the population's morals, instead of making a new system and disturbing the owners of the present one. They pick at symptoms instead of healing the sick body. They find the smell offensive and want to deodorise it instead of burying it.

‘And the people they're doing this to won't resist. They've had proved to them lately that the effectiveness of military power is limited, the economy shows them the shortcomings of romantic free enterprise, and the polluted water, earth and sky tells them there are no more frontiers: we've come to a brick wall. The end of the line. As far as this system's going to take us.

‘Newspapers tell us the social fabric is falling apart, there's anxiety and terror, lawlessness in the streets, in the institutions that overlook the streets. Work is empty, living pointless. No one created this mess and no one wants it, but we can't escape it. They want to crush the groans and cries that come from it.

‘And the older among us know no resistance is possible. We're the stoned age, Meat.' And he grinned at me and got to his feet. He wasn't all that steady, but with the skill of that portion of his brain not eaten out
by alcohol, that kept him moving in search of another drink, he arrived at the keg and brought me back a drink as well without splashing any.

‘We are at the mercy of the best traditions of modern discourse: argument by assertion. I do it myself, I get angry. I predict a return to magic. Only in guesses and superstitions and blind hope can we get comfort.

‘The modern cult of violence and animalism,'—he looked down at his trousers, but said nothing. I looked too, but there was no sign there of violence or animalism—‘is an admission of defeat. We can't be men and resist or overthrow the monster that rides us, this way of doing things, this economy with its roots in feudalism, so let us go the other way and be barbaric. And since we can't free ourselves from the past, let us use educated words for our defeat: alienation, cult of absurdity, realism, the beauty of the irrational, cult of cruelty.

‘But'—he looked at me sadly—‘the emperor has no clothes. It's no wonder men come to prefer ugliness, the nasty things of life, the bizarre, the grossly sensual, the degrading. At least ugliness is honest. The monster on our backs pretends to be kindness and goodness and justice and beauty and freedom. And all the time we see its arse, which is ugliness unredeemed, cruelty. Absurd, gross, degrading.'

He was silent for a bit. I didn't butt in with junior comments. When I looked back at him his face was strange and worked up.

One day the dancing light on the globes of his eyes would be gone; the sun still would shine on the round earth, but Jack would be missing. My old man died in Korea, but Jack fitted all my requirements for a father: you always knew where he'd be, what he liked, and what he thought. If you didn't feel like talking to him, all you had to do was move away.

He started to shout, if you can imagine the beginning of a shouted nothing. It wasn't actually a whole word. Just the steam blowing off his heated mind.

He did it again. I thought maybe he's choking. No, he was OK. While he tried to get it out I thought a bit. We wore our freedom like a shirt, ready to change it for a daily wage to buy freedom again at the bottom of a glass. And after however many glasses it took, the glass got bigger and bigger, we stepped into the glass and claimed our freedom to float away.

Alky Jack started several more times.

‘Tell 'em—!' he roared. Then he caught himself and stopped. As if his mind moved about in a strange house and brushed against unfamiliar furniture and he snagged himself on an edge. Leaving him with a splinter of doubt. He rubbed his arm, then plunged ahead, splinter or no splinter.

‘Tell 'em, Meat!'

‘Tell 'em what, Jack?'

‘Tell 'em they're people!' he shouted. ‘Humans!'

That shut me up. Did he know I was thinking of writing the Southern Cross on to paper? I looked at him. He was looking at the bottom of his glass, which was empty, as if he knew death was waiting for him not far off. And he still had so much to say. So many sentences not finished. And he knew he would never finish them.

I remembered the woman next door to Fortress Australia, a patient mother, who waited every night for her children to come home from their foolish games. I shivered. It was getting cool.

‘I'll get two more beers, Jack,' I said, scrambling to my feet.