The Glass Canoe (15 page)

WHAT'S IN THAT BLOODY KEG?

When we got back home to the pub, a shiny steel beer keg stood in the corner of the covered area. You could get in there, round the back of the pub, without breaking and entering. All you had to do was open a wire gate.

‘Someone's brought back his keg,' I remarked to Alky Jack.

‘Yeah,' he said and went on looking down his glass.

When the publican came round later he saw it.

‘Some cunt's finished with that keg I lost,' he said.

‘Christ, it's heavy,' when he tried to lift it. ‘Hey! Some cunt's welded the bung in!' he yelled. Then, ‘Some cunt's cut the whole top out and welded it back.'

Some cunt had indeed been busy. He shook it. It didn't rattle and it didn't slop, as it would if there was beer in it.

‘Bugger it. I've put it in as lost. It can do for a doorstop. Give us a hand.'

The door near the pool tables was always banging. We used the heavy keg to keep it open. When guys kicked its steel sides hoping for a hollow boom, all they got was a flat knock. Didn't even rock. They'd look at their thongs, toes, elastic-sided boots or five dollar Italian pub specials, shake their heads, look at the keg again and pass by.

‘What's in that bloody keg?' they'd say.

No one knew or cared. It was a doorstop. Fair enough.

The wind that blew up from the south and east brought rubber from Goodyear and the warm smell of bitumen from Shell. Sackcloth and ashes spread over the suburbs from elegant chimneys tall as minarets.

Dogs yapped in the distance a continual yap-yap, playing their fierce games, machine guns firing over open ground. Maybe in their games men fell.

After ten we all went home to imitate the dead.

TEN VIEWS OF IT

The Southern Cross is a book without pages.

It is a whale on its side in an uneven sea, listening to ocean music; in its belly is a tribe of Jonahs.

The Southern Cross is an old, battered, experienced flower, that opens six mornings and closes six nights a week, and on the seventh day rests.

It is a deflated football that ought to be blown up.

The Southern Cross at night is a light in the darkness, a kind of music borrowed from the sun.

It is driftwood. Bars, chairs, buildings, all are gathered on the shore where the tide left them.

The Cross is the past pretending to promise the future.

It is sharp and nervous as the hearing of the blind.

The Cross is a place where you cannot see your self.

It does not contain the future: that is up the street somewhere, over the hill, around the corner, in the brains of young children, in a pattern of words and objects that no one has recognised yet.

AN IDIOT AT THE HELM

No one knew who did him over, and when he got out of hospital he didn't know either. He'd always been an annoying bastard, now he was still annoying, but it was understandable. An ordinary guy acting stupid is hard to take, but anyone can put up with a crazy man.

The queer fella came back with one arm held funny, sort of limp from the wrist. His left leg dragged and pointed inwards as if the ankle stiffened in a broken position. A big scar over his right eye gave his face a lopsided look, I think the bones had been pushed in that side of his forehead. If it wasn't a car hit him—and left him for dead—someone must have picked him up, say by leg and neck, and hurled him against something.

There was another scar in his hair, but you could only see that if he bent.

His injuries never made the papers or anything. Someone just found him, put him in hospital, and let him go when he was patched up.

Some days he'd suddenly run round outside the pub brandishing a big stick in his good hand, yelling, ‘I'll get the lot of you! Come out and fight, you bastards! Come on, I'm game!' Flailing like a madman fighting the sea.

No one went. While it was a novelty they'd watch, sipping, from the doors, then after a while when it became a regular performance, they'd say, ‘There goes that silly bastard. Gone off again.' And forget about it.

He'd come in looking more settled and confident. I guess in his head he always won the fight.

Some nights he'd camp out in the grass at the back of the pub. When the police came after ten, looking for drinkers on the premises, they'd miss him. The grass was long.

He was guarding the place, though he was asleep. For breakfast he'd chew a piece of gravel, moving it round in his mouth. The snack bar woman gave him end bits of bread that no one would buy. He'd rat the rubbish for more substantial tucker. For liquid he had a choice of abandoned beer glasses left out overnight by people drinking in their cars; there was a tap at the back of the pub for fresh water.

Other times he was normal and hunched over the bar like the rest of us, like the thirsty round a well.

(I climbed up in the struts supporting the roof members one night to get an old guy's coat someone had thrown up there for a joke, and when I looked down they all looked like round animals attached to a rectangular, many-titted mother.)

Then maybe he'd rouse himself and become a would-be publican, going round talking to groups of guys, buying drinks—drinking sevens, like a publican—giving advice to the barmaids, even going behind the bar to count the glasses, looking at the latest amount rung up on the registers. They were Nationals, if it matters.

‘Takings are down,' he'd say. ‘You've all got your hands in the till.'

‘That's enough of that. Piss off,' Sharon said.

He thought, for some reason, all four registers should show the same amount.

‘Someone's made a blue,' he'd accuse them. ‘Happens all the time.'

I guess he was lucky he could still talk.

If it was a quiet day, he'd start making motor noises in the bar, beginning with the sound of cars starting up and getting on to a steady top gear sound. Then, glass in hand, he'd go out in the car park, examining the vehicles that happened to be there. I don't know what
he saw or what he thought, maybe to him it was a yard of used cars.

Saturday after the New Year, he drank his third beer in a hurry and marched out the back of the pub where the side wall is low, climbed up on the roof and we heard him tramping over the iron of the roof, then lost the sound when he reached the tiles.

I thought I'd better go out and catch him if he fell off, and seeing me go, a few others came. By the time we got there he was perched on top of the Southern Cross sign, driving the pub. We heard the noise of his motor clearly, despite the traffic, and we yelled at him to come down. He didn't look at us, he had his eyes on the road.

He was riding the body of the sign, legs straddling it. Then he started to pull sideways at the top mounting of the sign.

‘What's the stupid bastard up to?' someone said.

We watched a bit longer. His efforts were stronger, he tore frantically to pull the sign to the left. His feet came up and smashed the Southern part of the neon sign, making it read THE CROSS. Still he wrenched at it.

‘He's trying to make a left turn,' I said. ‘He's driving it. Trying to turn the wheel. He's trying to drive the pub on the road. Out into the traffic.'

When he couldn't turn the wheel, and saw it was hopeless, he stopped making engine noise and came
down. We helped him off the roof, he didn't thank us. He went straight in and bought another beer, set it before him and thought and thought.

That day ended up, too, with the queer fella outside brandishing his stick, challenging the pub.

‘Come on! Out! Someone pinched the key to the steering lock! Who did it? Come on, out!'

We never saw him hide it, but he put that stick away in a special place. It was always the same stick. There was a darker mark on it where he held it in his good hand.

Storms excited him. During a beauty, drinkers leaned at the red bar looking enviously out at the fury of the weather.

No doubt old people, fit for dying, lay awake grateful for this symphonic accompaniment to their last significant action, imagining themselves at the eye of the storm.

Lightning flashes lit the set faces at the red bar. Thunders roaring echoes in their single hearts.

‘Go it, God!' shouted the queer fella. ‘Give it to 'em! Stick it right up 'em!'

And he clapped his hands delightedly at the next thunderclap right overhead.

BETTER THAN A WORLD FULL OF NONGS

It was around this time some guys dressed in sharp suits came round and asked us when we'd seen young Sibley last.

‘A month ago,' I said. I think it was a month.

They asked around a bit more and went away. They didn't tell us who they were and we didn't ask. Young guys are always going missing.

A week later some of Sibley's papers turned up, part of his findings. Someone's young brother found them in the empty yard behind the welding shed attached to the compressor hiring place. This open space was a dead-set destination for a parking area, but at that time was a haven for dock, wort, Parramatta grass, paspalum and that aniseed weed that stinks on your
hands for hours and takes over whole paddocks for its lush contamination.

The papers were single sheets stapled together in sections. I hoped Sibley had made better copies and that these were roughs. Some of the guys took a look at them, turned over pages, but there were too many words. They might have read more if they'd had the authority of print. They ended up passing them over to me.

‘You know more about this sort of junk,' Mick said. ‘Besides, you got on with him OK.'

That seemed a good enough reason for everyone. I took the sheets, got a fresh schooner and began to read Sibley's mind.

‘Decision making is individual, group and hierarchical.

General feeling: drinkers are part of nature, victims of nature.

Present-oriented: the past gone, future non-existent.

All made the same choice as most chosen value orientation, except in area of new beer, old, or Resch's.

Drinkers have no drives or motivations, exc. towards Southern Cross.'

This must have been early stuff. The next sheet had some general observations, probably for his own use.

‘NB. They don't live in the apparent world alone, nor in the world of social activity, but are constantly at the mercy of their language. Language is not incidental. Their real world is built on the language habits of the group.'

There followed a bit on word sequences. Young Sibley had really listened to the pearls that fell from our frothed lips.

‘Word sequences most used:

I'm going to

That's a

I want a

I got

Is a

He's a

I'll bloody

It's a

She's a

He's going to

I don't know

Look at

Buggered if

Come outside.'

Then a set of what he called Further Remarks.

‘Drinkers seem inferior to non-drinkers in the same apparent degree as they lack contact with non-drinker groups.

There is need for more adequate grasp of Drinkers' concepts and conceptual styles if educational programmes are to start in a known framework rather than on an untested set of assumptions.

Classificatory ability poor, exc. with local natural objects such as schooner, middy or seven. Some have seen a champagne glass, but port, sherry, etc glasses showed low recognition. Wineglass gained 50% recognition, but evidence points to beerglasses or water tumblers being generally used for wine.'

Maybe if I'd kept on at school and gone to University I'd have been able to write a thesis. But why bother? My name was on the board for pool and I partnered the Great Lover in the weekly tournament. I folded the papers and got Sharon to mind them for me. She had a plastic bag.

As we tossed for the break I hoped Sibley would turn up. One more PhD in the world wasn't going to matter. Even if he failed and swept streets, hefted garbage tins or filled cars with juice, it seemed better to fill the world with educated people, no matter what job they did.

On the Sunday I got home early from the club and for some reason angry. I felt angry with that mother next door still waiting for her kids to come home to sleep.

‘Let 'em stay out a bit longer,' I called to her.

‘It's getting dark. Time they came home,' was all she said. Not even upset that I chipped her.

Later I heard them come home, noisy and laughing and playing and fighting. Real kids. I looked out—my front door's always open—and she kissed each one lightly.

After that kiss they all fell silent and walked in her little house like zombies.

SHORTY

He was a pleasant little guy. Never made much fuss round the pub, kept his blues for other places, which helped the cause of peace and quiet in the Cross. And he only had one eye. That is, he had two but one was glass. He lost one to a BB shot before he was eighteen.

I was there when this big girl took a fancy to him. He'd peeled off from a group and was on his way for a pee. She stepped out in front of him and bumped his chest with one enormous lung. He sank into her some distance, then the pneumatic effect pushed him back in a slow motion rebound.

‘Sorry,' he said.

‘Sorry,' she said a fraction later, waiting for the sight of her to register. His eyes were just above the lung that fended him off.

He was about to duck past, but she stepped to that side.

‘Sorry,' he said, dying for his pee.

‘What religion are you?' she said, fixing him with her eyes.

‘Heathen,' Shorty said immediately.

‘Pardon.'

‘Heathen.'

‘What's that?'

‘Heathen.'

‘Oh.'

That stopped her. She exhibited doubt, her reactions slowed, he slipped past.

The day he got back from a week away fishing at Ulladulla she was there again, watching him over the bar. I say over, because she was humped in a little metal chair over by the wall, and he was standing over the other side of the bar. Her eyes just skidded over the red bar and hit his face.

He looked away. And told us about the lump over his left eye, while he ate his chocolate. He always ate chocolate with beer.

‘I was in this pub, I mean we were but the others pissed off up the street for some fish and chips—the counter lunch there was lousy—and I was on my own. Some big bloke kept pushing me down the bar, a bit, then another bit. I look up at him.'

‘Git outa here,' he says.

‘What did you say?' I say.

‘Git outa here, wog. This is a white man's pub.'

‘So I go whack. And knock this big bloke arse over head.'

‘Outside,' he says. So we go outside and get stuck into it. Things end up much the same way out there. I collect this lump over the eye and I end up flattening this big bastard. That's all right. The others turn up with the fish and chips and we sit outside at a table and polish 'em off. We're drinking there for quite a while, it was just after Gunsynd got beaten and some locals were talking near us and after a bit I realised they were talking about me beating this bloke. Turns out he was the golden boy of the district. They went on about it, but right at the death this one that had seen it—he didn't seem to know I was sitting right at his elbow—he says, “By Christ, you should have seen that little wog bloke hit him”.'

He waited, looking from one to the other of us. We said nothing.

‘He said I was a little wog bloke.'

‘We heard.'

‘You bastards,' he said. ‘I'm no wog.'

We looked at him, said nothing.

‘I know I'm dark—'

‘Dark? We have to bring you in to the light to see who it is.'

‘Bastards,' he said. ‘Useless bastards. You can all get stuffed.'

And turned away from us to pretend to drink alone. This brought him face to face with the big girl.

‘Christ,' he said. ‘She won't take her eyes off me.'

‘Likes wogs,' someone said. We laughed. Shorty had a great sense of humour. He'd make his good eye go round in circles while the glassy one stared at you. For a moment you didn't want to laugh because you thought it could see you.

A month later he was living with her.

Some weeks after that we thought we'd have a bit of a joke with old Shorty, so we went round to the boarding house where he stayed. It was half past eight in the morning, and a Saturday, so we had till ten before the pub opened.

We listened outside their window, which we found by identifying Shorty's voice. He'd woken up dying for one. He worked hard during the week and though we'd last seen him late the night before we had no reason to doubt that it had been anything else but a good root that put him off to sleep.

But here and now was a different story. We could hear him after her, trying to catch hold of her, touching her, making little whispers like Come on, Love, and Aw, Open Up, Love, and Let's Get on the Bed And I'll Show you Something.

‘Get away,' she said. And her voice was only a few tones deeper than old Hugh's after his rum chaser.

He came back like a terrier, worrying at her from all sides. She belted him a backhander with one of her forearms that weighed as much as both his legs. She was strong as a horse.

Back he came, she belted him again and repeated her advice to get away.

This went on for an hour. It was at least ten minutes. I studied a straying mantis that bobbed and swayed when I got near him and tried putting my finger near his triangular jaws, but he refused to bite.

There was a sudden silence from the bedroom. Perhaps thirty minutes silence, then she started to grunt. Sounded fearsome, but there were no sounds of her hitting him. I'll swear the grunts went on for an hour. The Cross would be open, the first beers getting poured.

The grunts got faster. And faster and faster until they merged into one awful long ooooooooooooo! which rose near the end to a sharp scream, then cut off like a knife. Silence.

I couldn't help it. I thought of the bar, I thought of what was going on inside. I
gave them a minute to get their breaths back and yelled in at the window, ‘Why don't you pick on a man your own size?'

More silence as they came up for air. You could hear them puffing. Time stood still.

A voice came from the room, a voice dripping with sweat, heavy with spent effort.

‘I never found one my size.'

It seemed reasonable.

We lit out for the pub, where we belonged.

The big girl got too much for him. There were fights, cuts and bruises. And a broken rib where she fell on him.

He went to a football function up at the bowling club with the boys, but somehow she got in. He danced with some bird he'd never seen before, put the hard word on her in the middle of the dance floor and got his face slapped. Twice: the big girl had to be in the act.

When he didn't come home to tea at all for a week, she came in to the pub at eight o'clock one night and let him have his tea, plate and all. All over him. Gravy and chops, dabs of mashed potato and squashy pumpkin and a spattering of beans, the whole mess highlighted by a generous helping of tomato sauce.

The whole pub was on it. Naturally, because before she let fly she yelled, ‘Here's your dinner, Shorty!' And there was Shorty, wearing plate and food together. With a final gesture she tossed him a knife and fork, which fell clattering to the floor. He couldn't catch them: tucker was all over his face, blinding him.

The pub roared.

Not outfaced, Shorty's tongue came out, did a circuit round his mouth—the beer hadn't left his hand and he didn't spill a drop—tasted a bit and yelled back at her. ‘You stupid big slut. How many times I told you I like 'em well done? On the burnt side. Another thing, there's no taste in the gravy. Bet you forgot the bloody salt.'

That was all right. He ate what he could salvage of his dinner, wiped his face on a Daily Telegraph left over from the morning, and asked for another beer. But it finished him with the big girl.

He couldn't go and drink at another pub, that wasn't done round the Mead. He had to get out altogether. He just couldn't shake her off his tail.

He left.

We saw him next a year later. He came back brown as a berry from Queensland and was having his first drink of Cross beer on a Friday afternoon when I'd got off a bit early from the course as a result of a deluge. Couldn't take the tractors anywhere near the fairways for fear of damaging the grass.

‘I just got in,' he said. ‘Where's the rest of the boys?'

‘Bit early yet.'

‘Been up north,' he says. ‘Banana land.' And slipped a milk chocolate into his mouth.

‘On the coast?' I say. It's good to see Shorty again.

‘In to Isa,' says Shorty. ‘Got a job at the trade.' He was a carpenter occasionally. ‘Put in these shelves for shops for a bit, then went out further for nine rotten months.'

‘What kept you there?'

‘The brass. Good brass. White men won't work out there. Only six months, then they get out.'

‘On the stations?'

‘On the stations. Went down to seven stone two from twelve and a half stone.'

Shorty had always been a bit of a hard doer, and I didn't know whether to believe him. He looked poor on it, anyway.

‘I started to feel tired all the time, and got sores that wouldn't heal. Next time I was in town I go along to this quack and he says Get back to the surf and get some green vegetables into you. Tinned stuff'll keep you alive for a while, but you can't work hard on it.

‘She was a pretty hard town, Mount Isa. There was a cop hit a bloke with his baton, a bloke that knifed someone, and you wouldn't want to know, the bloke died. It took two plane loads of cops in from Brisbane to quiet the town. They could only walk round in twos and threes. And then not right in the town. People spat on 'em. Real worked up, they were.

‘In the pub where I was, there was a boxing ring out the back. When you had a blue, it was all out the back. Rules and all. Referee.

‘Murders every now and again. One bloke with a job at the mine blew himself and his shop up with gelignite that he used at the mine. He blew the lot to the shithouse, himself, her and three of his kids.'

He scratched his head. ‘I'll never know why they always take the kids with 'em. You'd think they could send 'em away to grandma's or something. Or up the shop for a lolly, and then do it. The only one to escape was his eldest daughter, and he'd been doing her and the wife found out, and the town. Why he didn't take her with him beats me, too. Anyway, let's get on to more cheerful stuff.'

‘Was it a good town to drink in?' I say.

‘I tell you, one thing impressed me. A lot of the ringers, on the stations, were black. These black ringers would come in at the weekend, say once a month. Cowboy hats and all. Say one had around two-seventy dollars. They'd put their names up on this big blackboard, there'd be maybe sixty names up. Start with two-seventy on Friday, and cut it out by Monday. The station owner, or manager, would send a taxi in for 'em—they're too valuable to muck around with, the good ones—and the publican would give 'em a dozen bottles of plonk and the taxi waiting at the door. Beat it, see you next time.'

‘They wouldn't short change 'em?'

‘Not game. Christ, they looked poor on it. Thin? Poor as piss. Yet they'd jog thirty miles in the sun and
not notice it. White man couldn't do it. Couldn't do their work either. Once they're on those cattle ponies there's nothing'll touch 'em. Beautiful to see 'em work.

‘Came south and in the Walgett Oasis I met a guy I hadn't seen since school, David Parks. He was all for going in to the bar where the blacks drink. Watch out, I tell him. I know all about them, he says, so in I go with him, you know, sort of keep an eye on him. Stop him doing anything too stupid. Well, he goes in and the first thing he pulls out of his kick is a twenty-dollar bill. Kid there weren't fifty pairs of eyes see that money inside half a second.

‘In two ups he was drinking with four of the biggest blacks you've ever seen. I shifted my notes to an inside pocket and just left some silver in my pants pocket. David Parks spent twelve dollars and had two beers. He started to get worried about where the brass was going, so he pretends he's running short. What about you? The blacks ask me. You got money. I whipped out the silver from my kick and slapped it on the counter. There y'are, I said. If you can get twelve beers out of that, tell
me
how, I want to know. Or else lend us a quid.

‘They took no notice of me after that. I drank my silver and left Parks with 'em. Hour and a half he was there by himself, playing pool with 'em, too scared to leave, and for that last hour and a half the big ones
were gone and he was still too scared to leave. Until the full twenty bucks had gone.

‘Picked up two on the road.'

‘Two who?'

‘Two jokers. When I asked where they wanted to go they said Doesn't matter, where you're headed for. Gilgandra, I said. That's the place, they said. They got in.

‘Well, without a word of a lie I was scared. Scared I was going to bring my heart up. I was nearly vomiting. You wouldn't believe it. I tried opening windows. No good. They complained of the draught. I tried smoking. No good. They smoked a packet of mine in the first fifty miles. I got panicky. It was another two hundred miles to Gilgandra. One-eighty, to be exact. So I thought, I'll shift you. I opened her out. The Ford was in good nick and the road wasn't that bad. Eighty most of the time, round bends and all, and up near the ton where I could.

‘Thank Christ it was too much for 'em. They got scared. I could see 'em looking at me sideways. Must've thought I was off my head. This next town coming up, they said, We get off here. Sure? I said. This is our stop, they said. OK, off they got.

‘Do you know I had the seats out, upholstery sprayed, Aerosol in that car, under it, through it. Out in the sun with the doors open for weeks, but it never left the car. Sold it in the end.'

‘What did you say to the buyer?'

‘Told him some kids pinched it and taken it joyriding and left it like that. It'd go away in a week, and that was why I'd knocked two hundred off the price.'

‘You're exaggerating,' I said, grinning at him as he took an extra large swallow.

‘I kid you not. Soap and water they did not know.'

‘Any other hitch-hikers?'

‘Yeah, coming back. In Tamworth I picked up this guy by the road with a pack and all. Real hitcher. Bugger me if he doesn't come from Windsor. He's clean, speaks real nice, got good manners and we get on real well. The first place I stop he says, Let me buy you a beer. So he buys me a beer. I never drink much on the road. He tells me he's a professor. He's just spent seven days in the bush to find out how hitchhikers see the country. And we go on from there. So I decide I'll take him all the way, tell him I'm
on the way to Sydney, and Bob's your uncle. He talks most of the way, but he seems to know when to stop. You know?