The Glass Canoe (2 page)

SHOOTING BUTTERFLIES

Down the back of the Southern Cross kids were shooting butterflies. Occasionally pellets tinkled harmlessly off the tinted glass windows of the saloon bar or made little dints in cars in the car park.

They never shot at the big neon sign riding high above the pub. It was a proud sign: T
he
S
outhern
C
ross
. They had a natural reverence for neon.

Butterflies flew free. They dazzled the eye and the mind with their freedom. Flight was something we could never know.

At night when the butterflies had gone to bed and there were no moving targets to hit, they'd pot fireflies. We don't get fireflies down the back of the Southern Cross; fireflies were street light globes. Somebody put little shields round the globes to keep out rocks from shanghais or the human arm, but BBs or slugs couldn't
be kept out. Sometimes the street was in darkness for a mile in both directions. They were sodium lights. Perhaps that was the difference.

I used to do it once, but I'm not a kid anymore. None of us was too happy about it: globes weren't moving targets. It was against the rules to aim at a butterfly when it stopped, you had to go for it on the wing. It made for a lot of stray shots.

In summer, what with daylight saving, the air-rifles would be popping till nine at night and by then the drunks from the pub would be too full to chase us. Anyway, they were our fathers or brothers or someone up the street.

When I could pass for eighteen I was initiated, and became a man. I went inside the pub and bought the beers. Before that we used to sit out in the cars and let Mick go in, or Flash, because they looked eighteen. At fifteen I was fresh-faced, I took longer to graduate.

On hot days we jumped fully clothed into our bottomless beer glasses and pushed off from shore without a backward look. Heading for the deep, where it was calm and cool.

The Mead was our territory, the Southern Cross our waterhole. The next tribe west drank at the Bull, and on the other side the nearest tribe holed up at the Exchange. While your tribe's waterhole flowed, you never went walkabout to another tribe's waterhole.

Unless there was trouble, some little matter to be settled.

HE ISN'T A PANTS MAN

After you have a fair bit to drink of an afternoon the future is sort of blank; the present is all there is. Sometimes you wonder. Where will I be when. Not often, though. Next moment you see a splash of rust on the tiles about belt level. Rust? Wet a finger, touch it. Ten to one it's sticky.

It brings your wonderings smartly back to the present.

Out the door you see, around four o'clock, men coming from all directions, walking lightly between flying traffic, flittering and darting towards the Southern Cross, moths towards the light.

By five the place is crowded. The noise.

I
had this job in an office for a while and what the pub noise reminded me of was going down to the factory. As soon as you opened the door the blast hit you. It was everywhere. There was so much of it that one of the old hands was taken sick one day and trying to tell someone what was the matter, but this guy couldn't hear and thought he was just raving on, and turned away and the old joker kicked the bucket right there on the concrete floor. I didn't like that noise, it tried to take you over, leaving no room for anything else. You couldn't think. Unreal, it was. I got out of that job quick.

The noise at the pub was just as loud, but quite different. You could sort of swim in it after a while.
By the time you got four or five schooners into you there seemed to be a cushion in your head, anyway. But that's not why I loved to let it wash over me and carry me along. It's because it was people-noise, not machine-noise. What silences there were—not many—were shallow. Like a few inches of water over sandflats.

The first time I drank any decent amount I
got back home and wrote down on a bit of paper what I felt, like the feeling on the backs of your hands, your lips, the way your eyes feel. Where that paper is now I haven't got a clue. I
was very young.

They call me Meat Man. They reckon when I grow up I'll be as big in the meat department as Fuse. He's an old rodeo rider, very bandy. Instead of being a ton of dynamite with an inch and a half fuse, Fuse is eight stone wringing wet but in the meat department he's never been beaten. When he's challenged in the matter of length he'll only bring out enough to win the challenge. No one has ever seen the whole thing.

Yet for all that he isn't a pants man.

SUPPLIES

Men came round, usually Friday and Saturday, and sold things cheap from the backs of their vehicles. They'd go to the licensee, ask could they sell in the pub.

‘What are you selling?'

‘Shoes. Straight off the boat.' Never which boat, it could be a Manly ferry.

‘How much you asking?'

‘Five bucks.'

The licensee would push out his lips, look doubtful, say nothing.

‘What size do you take?' the hustler would say when he saw it was the only way.

‘Eight.'

Out would come eights. ‘They're yours.'

‘No.'

‘Go on, take 'em. Do me a favour.'

‘I don't know . . .'

‘It'd please me if you would.'

‘OK. Thanks. Sure, go for your life.' And the salesman would put fifty cents on the next ten pairs to cover it. After all, he got them very cheaply. Left in the hand they raised blisters.

They'd bring oysters, prawns, and one man with a big wicker basket always got a good sale for his garlic sausage. A lot of sales went to hungry drinkers who'd been there since ten in the morning if it was Saturday, or hadn't been home for tea if it was Friday.

Shirts, vegetables, fish, kitchen sinks, tyres, stoves, meat from the abbatoirs, timber, copper wire, welding rods, bolts of cloth. You could get anything, and if you wanted something you'd tell someone, who told someone else and it was there next week.

What with the snack bar, you could stay at the pub all week if you had nowhere to go. As long as you had a car to sleep in for the cold weather.

It was home. The world and history passed by on wheels. Life stayed outside. Babies were started, and born. Weddings, shootings, promotions, dismissals, hungers, past and future—all were outside.

LET'S GET BACK

Morning, like a brand new baby, would come up on broken glasses, pools of stale sick and the odd car left behind by drinkers who couldn't make it but were cluey enough to call a cab. Not that the boys in blue were waiting outside the pub to put the bag on departing drinkers; if they did that they wouldn't have room enough at the station for all the excess oh-eights from just one pub, let alone if they did it outside all the pubs in the district.

Let's get away from the politics and back to the pub.

The red bar was the only bar I've ever been in that had no mirrors. We were busy enough watching each other, we had no time to look at ourselves.

SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY

Christmas Eve the pub was rocking with the din of voices and shouts when over all there was a tremendous crash. The din stopped. There was a mass move to the doors. Up the street a truck lay on its side and three other vehicles, two cars and a low loader, were stopped at peculiar angles to the road. In the truck was a party of do-gooders surrounded by wrapped Christmas presents for the kids' Home, except most of the volunteers and presents were no longer in the truck.

Out of the dark figures came, and more from newly stopped cars. They crept over to the presents and began to help themselves. All the volunteer cheer-bringers were injured or dazed, but the harpies that came out of the night didn't mind, they pulled Christmas presents from the hands of the people only just conscious enough to grip the edges.

In a body the boys from the Southern Cross ran up the street taking cover from the streetlights on factory lawns and flattening themselves against fences. They descended on the harpies and did them over, all but two good runners who left their cars in the street and headed up the steep hill to the lake.

The boys headed back to the pub, full of virtue, talk, bruised knuckles and thirst.

Much later, the two runners sneaked back, walking soft as spiders.

At night the Southern Cross often looked, even to me, an illuminated tomb. A sort of past solidified in masonry. The traffic tried to run by all the faster to stay in the present or the past might grab them. But to us, our tomb was where life was: outside was a world fit only to die in.

The dark, a live monster, leaned on the roof and tried the glass doors. Its eyes were black, fathomless as death.

FORTRESS AUSTRALIA

My mother died not long after the traffic there got real bad. We used to live in a house right on the main road, one of a row of the old Caroline Chisholm cottages—they're demolished now and a car sale yard there instead—and when they widened the road and it got busier and busier, she got sick.

At night the house shuddered with the big refrigerated freighters, semi-trailers, low-loaders, cement trucks and all the rest. You couldn't use the front door. Day and night it was, the sound going through you like knives in a cutter, and her dying. I held her hand once and felt her pulse dragging. Like knots in a bit of cotton, only not spaced evenly.

When I was old enough and with her dead, I got out of there and went to live up near the lake. The lake was a fresh water catchment on high ground, fed by
ground still higher, so you can see the Southern Cross was well down in a hollow. The kids get in the lake area after dark and carry on. Every now and then, when they get too bad, the ranger gets police help and they go through and hunt the kids out.

I live in an old house. There's half a dozen of us there. We all chip in to pay the rent. Most of the time I have a room to myself, and I like that.

I christened the house
fortress australia
, a phrase Alky Jack used. It was big and rattly, nothing fitted flush any more. No locks on the doors.

I painted the name on the front wall, in different coloured letters. The people round about don't like the letters being so big, but they're shy about telling us. They leave us alone.

Up at the lake the birds' song is so clear you'd think it was words they sing.

MARKET ANALYSIS

Saturdays, depending who was cellarman, you'd have to watch out for the cocktail. The man that was supposed to come round to check had his hand out, so they forgot to put that purple dye in the slops tray. At the end of the day they'd take the pressure off the half empty keg and slip in the slops. An old guy that used to work there told me the first keg of the day was usually pretty right, but on a Saturday, say, about the third keg, they'd pull from the cocktail.

It used to get a bit cloudy.

You wouldn't think they'd need the slops to earn more of our money. Fuse showed me the cellar one day and how the kegs are lined up one after the other. I followed the plastic pipelines with my eye and noticed a point where the beer lines met with a tap on the wall.

‘That's the water,' he explained. ‘Flush out the system.'

‘What if they just left the water tap on?' I asked. ‘Just a dribble, even.'

He didn't answer me. He still worked there, then.

Saturday the noise would rise and begin to take over before twelve and go on all day till ten with only a small lull or two in the afternoon, when the race broadcasts were on and the pub dead still.

One Saturday, two guys appeared at the door with clipboards and pens at the ready and began to ask questions of the first people inside the door. They were doing a survey, but when they asked questions and got no answers but blank faces, they looked at each other. What was this? Then the race call finished and the noise rolled back like the waters after the children of Israel.

No use asking this mob questions. They went.

The cars outside, one by one, three a second, passed like a stream of time. I tried to imagine what it was like for a deaf person watching that traffic. Maybe a sort of formal game. But creepy.

IT'S NOT THAT EASY BEING OLD

No one minded too much what others did for sex. There was a sit-down cubicle in each bar toilet and two out in an old toilet shed. One day when it was raining like a bastard and I was busting for a pee as soon as I got out of the car, I ran into the old shed and began letting it out when out of the corner of my eye I saw movement. I turned to look in case it was a hand with a bottle, but it was only two harmless old men in the far cubicle. One had his trousers down and was touching his toes. Actually his hands gripped his knees. They were just at that stage of drunk not to mind me having a butcher's.

I don't mean they were homosexuals. It's not easy to be old, and still get a woman. Look at the jails. Guys inside for a few years get to like it, but when they get out they mostly go straight back to women.

Another old man came along the street every day with a sack slung over his shoulder. He picked up riches others discarded: bits of timber, bottles, wire, cans and things people threw from cars.

Once he put an airline bag in his sack and later found a human hand in it. A child's hand, it was.

Every time I saw him the beer tasted thick and nourishing, like roast beef. One day I saw him coming and bought him one, but when I held it out to him he glared at me and spat.

Didn't want my roast beef.

They told me he was illiterate, couldn't write his name. He wasn't that old, either, fifty-five or sixty. Sun, wind, rain had aged him. He looked eighty.