Death of a River Guide

by Richard Flanagan

  I see the boy, now older, still smaller than his fellow schoolmates. And I can hear what the schoolmates are saying to the small boy. They are calling him wop and dago and greaser and Jewboy. He is hurt, but none of it hurts like the hurt of the time when he discovers that everyone in the class has been invited to Phil Hodge’s tenth birthday party. Except him. Forty-one girls and boys. ‘But not you, Cosini,’ says Phil’s younger brother Terry. ‘We don’t have wogs,’ says Phil’s younger brother Terry, smiling. ‘Especially not snotty red-headed wogs.’

  The small boy quickly learns that he must fight back, no matter what the odds. No matter that he will day after day lose and come back into class after lunch with torn shirt and bleeding scratches. For he knows that when the circle forms around him and they start to spit on him, when they start to shove and the shoves turn to blows, that he must strike back. Even when they have him down on the hot black bitumen of the playground and a few hold him while others kick, even then he knows that he must keep flailing with whatever limb they have forgotten to pin or that he can momentarily wrest from their grasp, must keep on fighting because they can only win if he gives up. Day after day the circle hits him, punches him, kicks him, spits on him and chants, ‘Grease and oil change! Grease and oil change!’ Rubs steaming golden chips’ white potato pulp in his bright red hair and chants, ‘Blondie! Blondie!’ And he never gives up, and he never cries in front of the circle, not even when the teacher after lunch complains about the smell of his hair, and upon examining his head orders him to the sick bay to wash it immediately, shaking her head and saying under her breath, ‘Those migrants’ hygiene …’ Not even then, when his face burns with the pain of the total and utter humiliation of his pitiful plight, does he cry or give in.

  Nor, curiously, does he assert the fact that half of him is Tasmanian. Because he is proud, because he believes that people ought accept him for what he is, without him having to invoke half of his parentage in order to deny the other half. He simply refuses to accept their estimation of him as being less than them. He is joined in this refusal by one other child, Adie Haynes. Adie, like Aljaz, is an outsider. He is quiet around the other kids, who call him Coon. Adie doesn’t look that black. He is about as dark as Aljaz. ‘But we’re blackfellas, see,’ he tells Aljaz. ‘I dunno why that makes me different. But it does.’ And he, like Aljaz, seems to be in a state of permanent war with all the other school-kids. In Grade Four Adie leaves school because his family is heading back north. Aljaz plays with Adie the day Adie’s family pack up and load an ancient Austin with their possessions, and he laughs when Adie puts on his snorkel and goggles for the journey in a back seat crowded with five other children so that he won’t have to smell their farts. ‘See you, brother,’ says Adie and turns and disappears into the mêlée of the back seat, to resurface behind the parcelshelf like a skindiver in a submersible bell, a smile evident even through the scratched dirty glass of the window and snorkel mouthpiece.

  Looking back upon it now my childhood seems to have been a series of farewells. Saying goodbye to relatives going to live and work on the mainland where people were said to be happy and believed that tomorrow would be even better than today, saying goodbye to my aunts off to be interred in cemeteries. It all begins with saying goodbye to Adie that day and watching him wave furiously out of that rear window, his face obscured by a pair of goggles, and it all ends with saying goodbye to Couta Ho and leaving myself many years later.

  The day Adie left I was so upset Harry decided to take me for a drive. Harry’s drives were without purpose: more precisely, they were circular journeys which the path of the new main roads and highways seemed only to frustrate. Every tree stump, every ageing gum tree sitting alone in a paddock, every derelict wooden hut - looking half pissed, leaning like Slimy Ted at angles that seemed to defy gravity, supported only by blackberry vines and an almost human tenacity - every vista that looked away from the road, seemed to be cause for another of Harry’s interminable stops. We would all empty out of the battered Holden EK stationwagon - we being Maria Magadalena Svevo, Sonja, almost always a couple of cousins, of whom I have an unending supply - mess about in the roadside cutting, then head off into the bush with Harry beginning stories like this:

  ‘Never had the story straight from Uncle George, but I do know that Auntie Cec always maintained …’

  Or like this:

  ‘Well, it was here that your Uncle Reg was had up for poaching with Bert Smithers and Reg and Bert both played stupid in court, playing up Reg’s harelip and Bert’s cleft palate so bad that the magistrate declared them imbeciles who could not be held responsible for their actions and let them off and after …’

  Or like this:

  ‘Beyond them paddocks there, back where the Ben begins to rise up there, that’s where the cave that Neville Thurley and your grandfather lived in for two winters while they were snaring possums early in the Depression …’

  The stories went on and on. Harry’s was a landscape comprehensible not in terms of beauty but in the subterranean meanings of his stories. The new roads were not made for such journeys, but, as Harry put it, were simply straight lines to get you from A to B as quickly as possible, which was, he maintained, the way only fools travelled. The old roads built along the routes of carriageways, that more often than not were cleared widenings of old Aboriginal pathways, were the roads Harry seemed to like best. But he also made do with the highways, stopping the car at the oddest points to get out and chat about such places as the site where Father Noone - he of the magical powers - had frozen an adulterer to the spot. The man had, as Harry would say, been fooling around, and Father Noone had been speaking with his wife inside the now long-vanished hut of a house and had stepped outside to remonstrate with the faithless husband, who awaited Father Noone bearing evil intentions and an axe above his head. Just as the husband went to cleave Father Noone’s head apart like a melon, Father Noone uttered his immortal words: ‘You will stay such until ere the sun sets.’ So the poor man did, frozen to the spot, arms and axe immobile above his head, until night fell. And to this day there remains a piece of barren ground where the luckless adulterer so stood. At this moment in his story Harry would point downwards and sure enough, there it would be, the piece of barren earth. Year after year we returned, listened to the same story, and at its conclusion looked earthward and nothing ever grew there.

  Just when you thought you had heard them all there was a new story, but of course that always led back to old ones, which you seemed to learn not through desire or determination but through sheer repetition. Sometimes Harry would talk of his days upon the rivers, and the stories grew bigger and Harry more animated in their telling and these stories in particular entranced the young Aljaz.

  Of course there were no roads to the Franklin and the Gordon rivers and it was almost impossible to get to such remote country, but when Aljaz was seven Harry took him along on a trip to Strahan and from there by steamer across Macquarie Harbour to the lower reaches of the Gordon River. There Smeggsy and two others were camped, reworking some of the old pine stands upon the Gordon’s bottom reaches. Harry and Aljaz stayed with the piners for two days and nights in the humid rainforest, living at the edge of the great steel-black waters of the river. The piners drank strong tea sweetened with immense amounts of sugar or condensed milk and talked of how there was no money left in the game, of how they were the last pining gang on the rivers; talked of how it was all changing, of how not only the river people but the rivers themselves were doomed, to be dammed forever under vast new hydroelectric schemes and already there was bush work to be had cutting exploration tracks for the Hydro-electric Commission’s surveyors and geologists and hydrologists. They talked of Old Bo and swapped innumerable stories of his many feats, including his last and possibly his greatest, certainly his most celebrated, when he and Smeggsy had rowed Harry from the Franklin through to Strahan in twenty-four hours, only for Old Bo to die of a heart attack just as their punt rounded the point and S
trahan came into view. And as we too returned to Strahan aboard the steam tug, a long raft of Huon pine logs caterpillaring behind in the choppy waters, Harry told a story about every point and every cove and every island.

  Stories, stories, stories. A world and a land and even a river full of the damn slippery things.

  After Adie went away I can see that at primary school Aljaz makes a point of succeeding. And I can see it does him no good. The teachers find him too trying and too challenging. ‘He’s smart all right,’ Aljaz overhears one teacher tell another, ‘but it’s a quirky smartness. Undisciplined. More rat cunning than intelligence. If you know what I mean.’ Young Aljaz doesn’t. I can see the boy doesn’t understand the immediate meaning of these words, but that he gets the message nevertheless. To the teachers he is a smartarse. At high school he makes a point of failing at everything. But only after he has made a point of showing the teachers that he is smart. Only after he writes a good story. Or does all his maths quickly and correctly under the eye of the teacher. Why? wonder his teachers. Here within the river it is hard to see exactly why, but even through the thousands of litres of water rushing over me one thing is abundantly clear: by failing Aljaz begins to fit in with people. I watch him quickly come to the conclusion that success brings only contempt, whilst there is a camaraderie amongst the ranks of the fallen. The high school is new, set up for the vast housing commission suburb nearby that is rapidly filling to overflowing with young desperate families. The children of these families by and large expect life to give them nothing. They expect to be failed. By and large they expect to be unemployed, to be pushed around, to know only despair. So the honourable way to survive in the school is to make a cult, an artform, of failure. And if you are good yet insist upon failure, then so much the better. There are the heroic failures such as Slattery, who wins his place in the school running team with ease, and is a favourite to win the 400 metres at the Tasmanian high school championships. At the championships Slattery wins his heat in the fastest qualifying time. In the final, at the 300-metre mark he is ten metres clear of his nearest rival. He suddenly halts and starts running backwards through the pack of runners behind him, emerging triumphant at the wrong end of the race waving his long arms in triumph to the crowd of the school’s supporters. The teachers are outraged and perplexed as to why the children cheer and laugh until the tears run down their cheeks. But only the children understand that to win is for Slattery to participate in a lie that everyone in life has a chance of winning if they try hard enough. By losing so spectacularly, by turning his loss into a triumph, he has turned their collective fate into a celebration and a challenge to the teachers, who could not begin to comprehend what it all meant. They ask Slattery why, but Slattery can not put words to his actions, any more than the children can explain why, at that moment when his long legs began to move backwards into the mêlée behind him, they felt such a sense of euphoria. They only know that for one moment in their entire school lives they had posed a question about the injustice of their destiny, and the adults had not only not known the answer, they had been too ignorant to understand the question. But none of it can be put into words. And nobody tries.

  The small boy is not a heroic failure like Slattery. He is one of the many quiet failures the school gladly rids itself of at the end of his final year.

  Young Aljaz, now out of school and without work, looks at the photo of Harry and Auntie Ellie that sits on the mantelpiece. It doesn’t mean much to him. None of his family or his forebears means that much to him, and he takes a certain pride in how little he knows about them. Such photos sit in dark recesses in dark dusty rooms. And Aljaz was never one for being about inside, poking around in this and that. Inside is where Harry now spends most of his time, more often than not drinking in the company of Slimy Ted, who, after he had his cray-fishing boat impounded by the authorities for poaching, more or less stopped working. Aljaz was one for getting out and doing, and it didn’t matter much for a time whether the doing was good or bad, just so long as it seemed to pulse with the thick bloodbeat of life. Until the doing became the undoing of Aljaz, and the police came with their blueys, their blue-papered summonses, and Aljaz had to go to court again and again for being drunk and disorderly and drunk and incapable, once for drink driving, and once, though it really had nothing to do with him because he was only hanging onto the girl’s handbag, possession of marijuana. And then the judge said that if it didn’t stop, next time it would be jail, and Harry looked up from the game of crib he had going with Slimy Ted in the kitchen, put down his beer glass, took the cigarette out of his mouth, and said it had to stop and that the doing had to find other forms.

  The doing became football, for which Aljaz had always shown some aptitude, but which his school’s philosophy of losing had prevented him from ever shining at. He started training with the South Hobart reserves and by mid-season was regularly getting games with their senior side as a rover. With the senior games came regular money, and this meant considerably more to Aljaz than all the talk of the club, which others used to gabble about. The fans loved Aljaz, the way his long mane of flowing red hair would suddenly appear out of nowhere to be alone leaping into the sky, and they called him the Red Panther and the Great Cosini and Ali Baba. The newspaper dubbed him Fellini Cosini because of his cinematic marks, and opposing teams’ fans took to chanting, ‘Eight and a half, eight and a half.’

  I observe that I was happy then, in the fashion of those who know that happiness is as transitory as the clouds. My mind stops seeing and returns to thinking, my thoughts like persistent pigdogs who have run their prey to ground, refusing to let go, demanding that I answer their insistent question.

  Why did I take the job?

  From my present point of view, the perspective of the drowning man, drowning in consequence of having taken the job, this question is not without importance. My decision to take the job, to put myself on the train of events that would lead to my present fatal predicament, must be one that betrays what is self-destructive about me. Or at least what is flawed. Why did I take the job? Well, Pig’s Breath rang, and what was I to say?

  After so many years I had finally returned home. I was so glad to be back. But my happiness soon turned to dismay. Wherever I went I heard the same refrain: so-and-so has crossed the water to the mainland to get work. There were no jobs, but then, as friends pointed out when I became downcast about the subject, there never had been. The island had been depressed for a century and a half. I had been back for a few weeks and not a sniff of work, but then what the hell did I expect? I was a sick man too. Not badly sick, not life-endingly sick, but sick all the same. I seemed to have acquired a permanent form of mild dysentry and my belly felt soft and watery near enough to all the time. I got bad headaches, my hair came out in tufts so bad I had to get it cut back short as buggery; it then went all spiky and I looked like some crazy red razorbacked pig. Truth be known I felt rotten, felt so bad I’d find myself crying for no explicable reason, found myself weeping just watching news of some disaster on the TV or hearing a mother shouting at a kid on the street. I needed something real bad, but I didn’t know where or what or who it was. So Pig’s Breath rang, and what was I to say?

  Why did I take the job?

  Everyone knew how much I disliked raft guiding. It was one of my inexhaustible conversation topics. I seemed never to tire, particularly when in the company of other river guides, of telling all who would listen what an appalling job it was and how glad I was at long last to be out of it. I didn’t say that I had once loved it. I did say that the pay was terrible and getting worse, the conditions those of nineteenth-century navvies, the customers - referred to derisively by everyone in the trade as punters - fools or oafs or both. Raft guiding was all right if you were young and had nothing better to do, I was fond of saying, but it was no job for anybody over twenty-five.

  And I was thirty-six.

  And yet, when Pig’s Breath rang, before I had time to say a word, I felt the old excit
ement come back.

  I wanted to do one last trip.

  And, I suppose, it has to be admitted, there was the matter of Couta Ho. Without meaning to I walked around to her place on my first day back home, but I couldn’t bring myself to go inside.

  I see her now at that party, all of twenty-three, standing close to Aljaz, he three years younger, throughout the evening that they first met, all those years ago. Each time he went into the kitchen to get another drink, he was aware of her eyes following him. He had never been desired in this way, so overtly and so sexually. It frightened him. He had dreamt of such things and fantasised about such things, but when confronted with the reality he felt an unease so great that he thought nothing good could come of it. He asked Ronnie if he wanted to go, now that the party was beginning to die away. ‘Go? Why? There’s still beer to be drunk.’ He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the lounge-room. ‘And I think someone’s got you booked for the evening.’ Aljaz felt a terrible embarrassment. He knew how to cope with girls giving him the flick - at that he was expert - but a girl chasing him, well, that was unnerving. He went back out to the party and joined a circle of people on the opposite side of the room to where Couta Ho was talking to some friends of Aljaz’s. He had only been there a moment and she was back at his side. She was smoking furiously, though she only rarely smoked, talking ten to the dozen, and Aljaz, to hide his nervousness, joined her. He did tricks with smoke coming out of his nostrils to make her laugh, and as she relaxed, so did he. And when he leant down - for she was smaller than he - to show her another trick and took the cigarette out of his mouth, he felt her lips upon his. He felt his lips respond and then open, and felt her tongue leap into his mouth like some smoky damp fish. He felt himself falling and momentarily staggered as he readjusted his weight to take hers, then in response to her same gesture, put his arm around her and he felt her flatten into his body.