by Tony Birch
The river men told prison stories, drinking stories, lost dog stories, and tales of their years on the road. Ren was a good listener and quickly understood there were strict rules governing how a story was told and listened to. Interjections were occasionally allowed, by way of a jeer or a hand shooting into the air, requesting a point-of-order. Big Tiny was the most common culprit in that regard. Other stories were sacred, recited in hushed tones and observed in silence, except for the crack and groan of the fire.
Ren soon became so familiar with particular stories he knew them by heart. A favourite was the story of the wreck of a drunk who supposedly dug himself out of the hole he’d been in for years, got himself back on his feet and eventually became a rich man. The story lit the eyes of those around the fire, no matter how many times it was told. While none of the men had personal experience of the story, or the character himself, each of them would have been prepared to swear on the bottle the story was true. Big Tiny went as far as to claim that he’d once crossed paths with the reformed drunk. ‘He come out of one of them big banks in the city dressed up like a pox doctor’s clerk and got into this shiny new car. In the back seat, of course. He owns the bank and has his own driver.’
On another occasion Ren and Sonny were sharing a rusted car rim one afternoon when Big Tiny and the Doc got into an argument about the truthfulness of a story about a famous strong man from the old days – the Mighty Apollo. Tiny was nearing the end of the story where Apollo had dragged a tram up the Collins Street hill fully loaded with passengers, by his bare teeth. Tiny got overexcited and began stuttering and spitting. The Doc, impatient with him, started muttering quietly to himself, ‘Fuck me … fuck me.’ He picked up an empty wine bottle and hurled it across the fire. The bottle missed Tiny’s head by inches before shattering against one of the bridge pylons.
‘Shut the fuck up, will ya, Tiny. He didn’t drag nothin by his teeth. Apollo ate that tram.’
‘Fuck up ya self,’ Tiny screamed back. ‘I’m talking here. Ya know the rules. Apollo dragged the tram with a line of piano wire in his mouth. No man can eat a tram, ya fucken imbecile.’
‘And nobody drags one through the street by his gob. It was ate. Piece by piece. Don’t worry about that. I got an old mate, mechanic out there, that took the tram apart at the Preston depot. Apollo lived off that fucken tram for two years. Ate nothing but it. He drunk the sump oil and all.’
Big Tiny threw his arms in the air. ‘Fuck me. I give up,’ he said, looking across the fire to Tex for support. ‘How much longer we got to put up with this fucken lunatic?’
With Tex ignoring his pleas, Tiny turned to Sonny and Ren.
‘Don’t ya be listening to a word from his trap. If a government man was able to track down anyone in the Doc’s family they’d have papers signed and he’d be certified and put away for good. The Doc wouldn’t see daylight again. They found no one to put him away cause he had become an orphan. When he was a kid his own mummy put him out on the street one day with a sign round his neck begging someone to take pity on the bastard. He weren’t wanted, by no one. Not even the shirt-lifters would take him home. And no one wants him now.’
‘Up yours, elephant arse,’ the Doc spat. ‘Only one that was left for dead is you. Your old girl looked at you the day you was born and sent a telegram to the fucken circus, hoping for an earner from the sideshows.’
The Doc stood up, hitched his pants under his armpits and mimicked the performance. ‘Come see the whole world’s fattest baby – also born absent of a brain.’ He bowed, sat down and waved a finger at Tiny. ‘What Apollo done was in all the papers, with a picture of him tucking in the upholstery off a seat. Horsehair, it was. That’s what the sump oil was for. To wash it down. You ever tried eating the stuff?’
‘Horsehair can’t be eaten!’ Tiny screamed.
The Doc pointed at Big Tiny’s stomach. ‘Was eaten. You’d give it a run yourself, fatman. Could eat your own fucken leg. Between ya mouth and the gut ya could knock the Southern Aurora over. What they call that thing on the back of the train? The caboose. You’d do that for dessert.’
Tex smiled and Tallboy laughed out loud, while Cold Can giggled quietly to himself. Tiny didn’t find the Doc’s attack on him funny at all. He got to his feet, slammed a foot into the dirt and kicked dust across the fire.
Ren and Sonny joined in the laughter, thinking the river men were enjoying a joke between themselves. But before they knew it, the joke had got out of hand.
‘Ya know nothing, Doc. Why don’t ya tell these young fellas something of ya own life? Bout the poor kiddie ya killed way back.’
‘You cunt!’
The Doc charged at Tiny, head-butted him in the guts and knocked him to the ground. The two men rolled around in the dirt like a pair of mongrel pups. The others laughed, until Tiny rolled over and crashed into the coals and the sleeve of the Doc’s suit-coat caught fire. Tex had had enough. He picked up an iron poker and belted the Doc across the back of the legs with it.
‘Knock it off. Both of ya. Fuck this fire up and ya both barred. For life.’
He gave the Doc a second whack with the poker and turned on Tiny. ‘You fucken goose.’ He raised the poker in the air. ‘Say sorry for what ya said or it’s the same for you.’
While Sonny seemed to enjoy the spectacle, Ren was shocked by the sudden violence Tex displayed.
Tiny rolled the Doc onto his side and stripped him of his smouldering coat, stomping on it as he apologised for what he’d said. ‘I went too far there, Doc. You got my temperature going.’
The Doc picked himself up and brushed the dust from the knees of his pants, which hardly seemed worth it, seeing as the arse was caked in dry mud. ‘You don’t know what ya talking about there, Tiny. I have never dealt with no kids.’ With that, the Doc lay down by the fire, turned his back on the other men and soon went off to sleep.
Many stories circulated as to how the Doc came by his alias. A popular telling was that he’d once earned a living as a street quack with no medical training and had posed as a doctor going door to door across the city selling the medicinal powders he prepared himself, with a claim they cured colds, pains and general ailments. The powders were a risky remedy, seeing as the Doc purchased the raw ingredients from the hardware store – various chemicals and dyes mixed with warm water. It was claimed that he’d once sold a powder to a mother nursing a baby screaming from a gut ache and throwing up its own insides. Not more than ten minutes after the mother administered the medicine provided by the Doc the infant went off to sleep. When the mother went to fetch the baby the following morning she saw that it had turned a sickish green colour. The baby was dead.
While they had no idea if the story was true or not, the thought that the Doc may have interfered with kids scared the boys a little. After hearing Tiny’s story Ren backed away from the campfire and pulled Sonny by the shirt. Tallboy was watching and saw the worried look on Ren’s face.
‘Hey ya, boys, listen to me. Old Tallboy’s got a real good story to tell yas.’
He held up a half-full wine bottle and took a long swig for lubrication.
‘I remember one day I been drinking in town, by the Banana Alley there, with a couple of boys who was labouring casual on the railway, chasing some drinking money.’
He stopped and did the best he could to gather his thoughts before he continued. Ren and Sonny listened closely.
‘We had a good drink under the palm tree there. Could have been on a tropical fucken island if it weren’t for all the noise of the trucks. We finished off the grog and I wished them fellas best and went walking through town on my way to Gordon House for a feed and a bunk. I was going by the department store there. Myer. No good reason why but off I went inside. Ya know, to look at the wristwatches, smelling the perfumes in the air. The women. I took the moving stairs, up and up, to the furniture. Fancy wardrobes and tables. I see this bed with the big mattr
ess on top of the other mattress. Two mattresses. Can you believe it? Would sleep all of us here, I reckon, it was that big. You ever slept on a mattress like that one, you kids?’
Ren answered ‘not me’, and Sonny shook his head from side to side.
‘Wouldn’t have thought so. Well, I’m standing there eyeing the bed and this young buck comes along with his shirt and tie. Haircut. Shaved clean. Nametag on. Could never forget it. LEE. You know, like Lee Marvin. The kid, he seen me looking at the bed and come over. Gonna say fuck off, I was thinking. But nup. He points at the bed. Would you like to try it, sir? he said to me, like we was both gentlemen. I look down at my dirty boots and ask if I have to take them off and he says, I’m happy for you to leave them on.’
‘Must have been looking to get the arse from his job,’ Tiny speculated.
Tallboy ignored him and took another drink, emptying the bottle. ‘I said to him, well thank you, Lee, and lay down on the bed. None of you here ever felt a bed that way, laying in the clouds there. Then he says to me, would you like to try a pillow, sir? And I says, thank you, Lee, a second time.
Tallboy looked around the campfire, searching for a response from his audience while gathering confidence in his story. ‘The next minute he sticks the pillow behind my head like he’s my own nurse. Well, I rested my head down and was off to sleep before I knew it.’
Tallboy peered down the neck of the empty bottle. The others, including the boys, waited for him to go on. But he didn’t.
‘Then what happened?’ Tiny finally asked.
Tallboy lifted his head, opened his eyes and gave Tiny’s question some serious thought. Ren suspected that maybe Tallboy was making the story up as he was going along. He didn’t mind.
‘Well, I open my eyes and the young fella had a shop girl with him, they was over the top of me, shaking me awake. I’d give a ton of gold dust right now to have that old bed down here. I’d share it with all of you, I would.’
The Doc, who’d been laying across the fire, stealing the heat from the others, lifted his head from the ground. ‘And what the fuck does this story have to do with anything?’
Tallboy looked across the fire at the Doc, with half a mind to choke him to death. He took a deep patient breath and answered in a quiet voice. ‘It’s just a story bout a good day I had one time. And a young kid who didn’t treat me like shit. That’s all it is.’ He pointed directly at Ren. ‘It’s like these two young fellas here.’ He winked at the boys. ‘I see friendship in them.’
‘And it’s a good, good story,’ Tex said, by way of instructing the Doc to keep his mouth shut.
The campfire went quiet until Tex began humming a tune. The other men quickly joined in singing.
After the boys had left the camp Sonny asked Ren what he thought about the story of the Doc and the mother. ‘You reckon he would have killed someone? He don’t look like a killer.’
‘Nah. Not a child. Anyone who kills a kid, and if others know about it, they wouldn’t be walking round free. He’d be in prison. Maybe even hanged.’
‘They’d hang him for that?’
‘They hung that fella, Ronald Ryan, last year, for shooting a prison guard. And Archie says he didn’t even do it, was the other fella who broke out with him!’
‘You afraid of these men?’
‘Could be. But Tex, I reckon he’d keep them in order with that poker. See how hard he whacked them two for fighting? Anyway, I can’t give up the river cause of some old men. It’s our river too. And I like the stories they tell.’
The boys would come to know how much the river men loved their storytelling and singing. The only time they went totally quiet was whenever a snoop passed by the camp, sometimes an official from the Water Board, or a fisherman they hadn’t come across before. Tex would give the others the nod to go deaf and dumb. Anyone passing by who didn’t know better would have sworn the men were clapped-out mental cases. And that was the way Tex liked it. He didn’t care that outsiders looked down on them. Silence was a valued lesson he learned during his years away, a reference to a stint in prison for which he provided no detail, except to say, ‘It was where I come to know to keep the mouth shut and lay doggo.’
CHAPTER 3
Stories of the river were told across the city. There wasn’t a child living within reach of the water who hadn’t grown up warned away from it with tales of dead trees lurking in the darkness of the muddy riverbed, ready to snatch the leg of a boy or girl braving its filthy water. Rusting skull and crossbones signs, hammered into tree trunks around the old swimming holes, warned of infection. There were also the horror stories of children who disappeared on sunny afternoons never to be seen again, leaving piles of clothing behind on the riverbank, waiting for a parent or the police to discover the telling evidence. It wasn’t only children who drowned. As well as the suicides there were the accidents. People fishing fell out of boats from time to time and went straight to the bottom, weighed down by heavy clothes and boots. A dark joke claimed that drowning was a more fortunate end, as eating a fish caught in the river would cause a slower and more painful death.
On calm days, when the current moved slowly towards the bay, and the sun sparkled off the water, it would have been easy to mistake the river’s gentle disguise. During Sonny’s first summer on the river he decided nothing was going to stop him from going for a swim. He put the idea to Ren, who was less eager. If only half the horror stories he’d heard about the river were true, the riverbed was a graveyard he’d rather stay clear of.
‘I dunno, Sonny, about swimming here,’ Ren said, sitting on the pontoon, dangling his feet in the water.
‘I reckon you’re scared.’
Although Sonny was right, Ren wasn’t about to confess.
Sonny stripped to his underpants, pumped his arms backwards and forward as if he were an Olympic swimmer, and willed himself for the challenge. ‘It’s only water. Not much different than diving in the deep end at the baths.’
‘It’s nothing like the fucken baths. You can see the bottom at the baths. Here, you wouldn’t know if your own hand was in front of your face. Could be anything down there.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like stuff you can’t see. You wanna know what Archie calls the trees at the bottom of the river?’
‘What?’
‘When he was a kid they called them preachers.’
‘Preachers?’
‘If a person got caught in the snag of a dead tree and they never came back the family would have to get a preacher to stand over an empty coffin and pray for the life and soul of the dead person. Burying an empty coffin. Fucken spooky.’
The image of a rotting corpse lurking below the surface was enough for Sonny to step back from the edge of the pontoon.
‘I think old Sonny’s chickening out now.’ Ren laughed.
‘Bullshit, he is.’ Sonny let out a screech and dived into the water.
Ren couldn’t see any sign of him, except for a trace of bubbles, until he bobbed up halfway across the river, grinning. Ren realised he had no choice but to follow his friend into the water. He stood up, closed his eyes, crossed his heart twice and jumped in. He swam to the middle of the river and flipped onto his back. As the current caressed his body Ren noticed the shifts in water temperature, from warm to ice cold. He trod water and watched as Sonny let the current carry him downriver until he reached the shadow of the iron bridge and headed for the bank. Ren swam back to the pontoon and stood watching as Sonny circled the campsite and searched the empty humpy. He walked back along the track, jumped across to the pontoon and lay his body in the sun.
‘No sign of Tex and them?’
‘Nah. They’re probably up at the wine shop.’ Sonny was so happy he laughed out loud.
‘What’s funny?’ Ren asked.
‘This is good.’
‘Yep. It’s the best.’
&nb
sp; Ren sniffed his arm. The water smelled like nothing he’d expected. It was a rich scent, the same that was given off by the back garden after he’d watered Archie’s bed of tomatoes for him. As his skin dried he noticed specks of dirt, fine as baby powder, covering his body. From that day on, the boys carried the river home with them. They went to bed of a night with the scent of river on their bodies and through their hair, no matter how hard they tried to wash it out. And it was with them the next morning when they woke.
In the days after their first river swim the boys couldn’t stay out of the water. They explored the banks both upstream and downriver, trying out every swimming hole and increasingly testing their courage, jumping from rocks, out of trees, and eventually off the bridges that crossed the river. Their first bridge jump was from Kane’s, a cable bridge that swayed from side to side in the slightest breeze. It was no more than twenty feet above the water, but was challenge enough. Having conquered it they moved on to others, testing their bravery, each bridge higher and more dangerous than the last.
Late in the afternoons, Ren would sneak along the lane behind his house, slip into Sonny’s yard and stand under a hose, trying to wash the silt from his body before returning home. If he thought he’d deceived his mother about what he’d been up to, it was only himself Ren was fooling. When he brought the river home Loretta knew immediately he’d taken to the water. She pinched her lip and held her tongue, worrying over her boy as a mother would, but unwilling to crush the free-spirited nature she quietly admired.
The day of their first swim Ren dried off in Sonny’s yard with an old towel. It was stiff and felt like sandpaper against his skin.
‘Hey, Sonny, I better wait until my hair dries. I can’t go home with it wet or she’ll know where I’ve been.’