Death of a River Guide (13 page)

Of course, Jemma's death changed everything. Couta Ho had no capacity for self-delusion: a tragedy was, for her, exactly that, a terrible burden beyond words, the experience of which she understood would be bordered by the encroachments of passing time, but the pain of which would always endure. Couta Ho knew this to be something she had to bear alone because, much as she loved Aljaz, it was beyond his imagination, because his imagination could only encompass the present and her tragedy was one that needed the passing of time to be revealed. She knew the vast dimensions of what they had suffered, even if she did not understand it. He, on the other hand, claimed to understand the tragedy, tried to reduce it to something small, and thought it could be left in its time. For Aljaz saw Jemma's death as an obstacle to be got around, and once passed, to be left behind.

These vague thoughts of mine are spreading out like the jetsam that washes past my wet flesh. More precisely: how did Aljaz try to shrink the tragedy? By pretending it was Couta's alone. Watching all this unfold for a second time, it is this macabre refusal to acknowledge his own involvement in the death that is so sad. More precisely: his sadness shortcircuits itself by being unable to recognise its own existence. Aljaz said little; in fact he said less and less. What he did say were disconnected things like, ‘Life must go on,' or, ‘I'm just glad we had her for two months.' Things that made no sense to Couta, but which Aljaz seemed to gain some comfort from; things he kept on repeating as if they were some incantation that, if uttered enough, would ward off the darkness. Sometimes he tried to express his sympathy for her, to give her a cuddle or kiss he believed to be affectionate. Which she resented. ‘I'm just trying to be tender,' he protested.

She exploded. ‘That's not what tender is. Tender is having respect, and you have no respect for anybody. Not even yourself. Maybe that's what the problem is.'

She cried for a month and was inconsolable for a further six months, and when Aljaz one day berated her for not picking herself up and getting on with her life she looked at him and, with a sudden hardness that he had never heard in her voice, said, ‘You don't understand. Do you?' And then, still looking at him, her bitterness turned to pity and she said, in a softer voice that scared Aljaz more than her hard voice, ‘You poor thing. Even if you wanted to, you couldn't understand.' Which was true and he knew it.

Couta Ho continued speaking. ‘I thought maybe one day we could belong. Like people with families do, having their own time and their own place and growing old and crotchety and full of love in them. And other folks might even laugh at them just because they belonged there so powerfully and fitted that time and place so well that anywhere else they'd look plain silly. But they would belong there. Do you know what I mean?'

After this conversation a great silence grew up between Aljaz and Couta, so great that in the end Aljaz could bear it no longer. There was now a sadness at the heart of Couta Ho, and the sadness grew till it overwhelmed them both. When they made love she averted her face, and though her body would often (though not always) respond, her mind was always elsewhere, and rarely did she permit him to kiss her on the lips. At the end of their lovemaking he would feel as if he had wronged her terribly and he would apologise and feel a great shame, though about precisely what, he was unable to put words to. He was polite, asked her if perhaps it would be better if they dispensed with lovemaking altogether, and she said no, that she did not mind. But there was sadness at the heart of it and it pained him to see how his caresses seemed to burn her skin, each one a new wound upon an old scar. They both knew it to be destroying them, and they both knew they were unable to influence their fate, that they had been relegated to the role of spectators at the tragedy of their own unhappiness.

One evening, about eight months after Jemma, as they were washing up the evening's dishes, he turned to her. ‘Couta. I've been thinking. And I think it might be best if I go.' Couta Ho smiled wanly, as though he had said nothing more significant than that he was about to go to the corner store to buy some milk.

‘Fine,' she said. ‘Fine.' And smiled a second time, as though it all amounted to nothing. And when Aljaz realised that he felt no anger at her response, only a remote, abstract curiosity, then he knew it was finished. They continued to wash up and Aljaz did an unusually thorough job of cleaning the kitchen. They went to bed and lay side by side. He held her hand but she took it away from him and crossed it over her chest. When he awoke the next morning Couta Ho was already up. He spent some time in the bedroom, sorting through his clothes, deciding what to take and what to throw away. He left a little before midday, kissing Couta Ho demurely, almost absently on the lips at the front gate as if he were off to a day's work.

Aljaz went as far away as he could go. He went and took the footballing job in Darwin. Each summer for the next three years he returned to Tasmania during the tourist season to work as a river guide on the Franklin. Then at the age of twenty-six he threw in footballing in Darwin and guiding in Tasmania and drifted off around the east coast of the mainland, working here and there at whatever was going, driving harvesting machines on farms, serving in bottle shops, labouring on building sites. For ten years he did not return to Tasmania.

Until this day.

And there I see him: at the end of a river of tears, standing in a dry riverbed of stone, his gaze rising from the rockpools of memory, looking up at the front of her house that had once been his home also, wondering what she remembered of those times, wondering, Will I or won't I knock?

Wondering also: But would she want to see me?

And then turning away and clambering back up that harsh, dry riverbed of boulders.

‘An idea can be a dangerous thing. Hell, everybody knows that,' Maria Magdalena Svevo used to say. ‘It's a century of ideas eating the people who reared and fed them.' She's right, an idea can be a dangerous thing. Even before I got jammed down this dam plughole with half a river running over the top of me, I knew that. As much as I can, I steer clear of ideas, of believing in anything. It is simply too dangerous and I am in any case always afraid. I mean, I didn't even allow myself to believe in my own grief at Jemma's death. Because that's an idea. Right? Grief is just an idea. Of course it's bad when someone dies, but the fact is they have died and are gone and that's it. Full stop. What do I feel about Jemma's death? people used always ask. And I told them truthfully, I feel nothing. Nothing. But a desire can be a dangerous thing too. That's what I didn't know. And my desire was buried so deep within me that when Pig's Breath rang I didn't even realise that he had me worked out better than I had myself worked out.

Even on the phone it was easy to hear that Pig's Breath was evasive. Even then I could tell that he had no desire to be offering me employment. Not that he mentioned that at first. I could tell that he had no desire to talk to me. But I could also tell that he had no choice. So I reckoned things must be rather bad for Pig's Breath, that he needed me, and that even though I needed him, there was no way I was going to let Pig's Breath know how desperate I was for work.

‘Heard you were back in town, so I thought I'd give you a ring and we'd get together and see how life's been treating you,' said Pig's Breath. And so I went to meet with him in his office. That morning my health seemed to go from its normally bad state to one close to a fever, my body perhaps experiencing a physical premonition of the fate that meeting would inextricably bind me to.

I can see Aljaz now, sitting on the other side of Pig's Breath's dishevelled desk, trying to look relaxed because this time Aljaz thinks he has got Pig's Breath nailed. Aljaz has braced himself for this interview, determined upon being hard with Pig's Breath, rather than being quiet and deferential as he more normally is in such situations. He has had a couple of steadying rums at a pub on the way, and he feels their flame not as something warming but as something unbelievably cold, glaciating his throat and innards. For all his determination Aljaz is shivering, not only because of the rum, but because he feels nauseous and cold, because Aljaz wants to go down the river but is frightened of going down the river, because he wants to confront Pig's Breath and tell him what he really feels about him, but is frightened of Pig's Breath attacking him back. Aljaz's feet begin tap-tapping the floor in nervous anticipation and his hands start shaking so much that he has to put them in his pockets. ‘That's kind of you, Howard,' I see Aljaz saying before he takes refuge in flattery. ‘Well, you've done all right for yourself, Howard. Operations manager of Wilderness Experiences now.' And Aljaz waves an expansive, empty, only slightly shaking hand around Pig's Breath's mess of an office.

‘It's a long way from being a river bum,' says Pig's Breath. I watch Aljaz agree. It
is
a long way, for a dickwit. Pig's Breath was always stupid enough to think that operations manager of a small branch of a national outdoor tourism company was making the big time.

As I watch Aljaz and Pig's Breath confront each other over his crowded, messy desk, faxes, accounts and letters papering over wetsuit boots, petrol stoves, and tins of hypalon glue, I am shocked at how obvious is Aljaz's contempt for Pig's Breath, although, there, at the time, I think I am doing a great job of disguising it beneath banal pleasantries. Pig's Breath is, as he always has been, bearded and tousle-haired, though his geniality has degenerated into an irritating obsequiousness, his stocky build into fat. He is a wombat of a man, always shuffling away if approached directly. So there he sits across the desk from Aljaz, a mound of smug and bristly body odours so overwhelming that it turns my water-bloated belly even now. He relates a few stale anecodotes, enquires as to Aljaz's recent activities, flatters him when he tells a few stories.

‘You're a crazy Cosini,' says Pig's Breath finally. Then he comes to the point. ‘Ali, we've got a problem here, and I was wondering if you could help us, being an old mate.'

‘Sure, Howard, I'll do what I can, but, well, my life's pretty busy right at the moment.'

‘Ali, I won't beat about the bush. We've got a twelve-day Franklin River trip going out on Wednesday and we haven't got a lead guide. I was wondering if you'd be interested.'

‘I don't do that sort of thing any more.' There is then a silence that goes on for too long and Aljaz feels obliged to say something more, anything. ‘I used to. But I don't any more.' It is a stupid thing to say and Aljaz regrets it immediately.

‘I know
that
,' says Pig's Breath, who is obviously a little surprised at Aljaz. ‘We worked together - remember?'

I watch Aljaz's face flush with panic. He has a momentary blank and can think of nothing, while he hears himself saying out of some automatic part of his brain, ‘Yes, yes, of course I remember.' But what does Aljaz remember? All he sees is a puffy baby's shin and a yellow woollen bootie and he does not want to see it, he does not. He feels his bowels go weak and watery. ‘Excuse me,' says Aljaz, ‘but where's the er …?' Pig's Breath points out beyond a side door. In the toilet Aljaz, after relieving himself, throws water on his face and clenches and unclenches his hands in a vain attempt to stop their ever worsening shaking. When he returns to Pig's Breath he manages to haul himself away from the dangerous abyss of the past back into the present by clinging tenaciously to the purpose of the conversation.

‘Who's the other guide?' he asks.

‘New blood. Jason Krezwa. Know him?'

‘No.'

‘They call him the Cockroach. Big, but agile. They say he can carry two loaded barrels down portages leaping from rock to rock, never loses his balance.'

‘Like a cockroach?'

‘No, they just call him that because he's ugly. But he's a good guide. A lot better than you.' Pig's Breath has scored his first point, and I can see now that this is the pivot upon which the meeting turns Pig's Breath's way. I know Aljaz is rocked, his momentum lost. Having nothing smart to say, his body shaking with his unnameable fear, his guts again rumbling, he leans back in his chair and says nothing, waiting for the appropriate moment to step in and subtly humiliate Pig's Breath. Except it doesn't happen. Pig's Breath continues. ‘He's experienced. Two seasons on the Tully, a season on the Zambezi, another on the Colorado. He's just never run the Franklin. So I need a head guide that can show him.'

Here I see Aljaz manage to pull himself together enough to say, ‘Head guide wages, of course.'

Pig's Breath stops and sucks his breath in between his teeth. ‘No. We don't have head guide wages. We have Wilderness Experience rating wages. Single D through to triple A. Triple A guides get $ 109 a day.'

‘So I get $109 a day.'

‘No. To be a triple A Wilderness Experience guide you need to have worked for us continuously for five years plus attended all our in-house training courses.'

‘Which the guide pays for, of course.'

‘Well, that's head office policy. There's not a lot I can do about it. In any case, it's not unreasonable that people pay for their own training. Look Ali, I know it seems a bit rough, but that's how it is. I've spoken to them in Sydney and they've agreed to give you a special one-off single A rating in recognition of your past experience.'

‘What's a single A worth?'

‘Eighty-seven dollars a day.'

At this point Aljaz's outrage temporarily overwhelms his nervousness. ‘Jesus, Howard! We earnt more than that ten years ago doing the same job. And we didn't have to put up with this sort of shit.'

‘I know. I know it's rough. I've complained, believe me, I've argued with them. But what can I do? They're the rates, it's the company's conditions. I mean, I just don't have that sort of power.'

‘Who does? I'll talk to them. Fucking $87 a day. You got to be joking.'

‘I know. I know it's - it's wrong. But look, Ali, I went out on a limb to get you this job. Believe me, they weren't happy about having you. You were a good guide, but you had a certain reputation …'

‘Reputation?'

Pig's Breath had had no reputation when we guided together on the river all that time ago, except for cocking things up. He had been a bad boatman and rude to his customers, on one occasion refusing to talk to anyone for two days while we were on the river. But I did, as Pig's Breath put it, have a reputation. For running the big ones, the rapids no one else would run, and making it through; for threading lines so fine no one else thought it possible, and for never wrapping my raft on rocks or looping or flipping or losing punters. I could turn the most useless pack of punters into a team that could make a raft dance down a rapid. You should have seen what I could do with a raft on a rapid - dangerous things, wild mad things, but always beautiful to watch and even more beautiful to be part of. You might think there's not much to getting a raft of people down a rapid, but you watch a bad boatman then watch a good one work that water. The bad one just gets washed every place it's bad and dangerous and his raft is buffeted and tipped and sometimes flipped and looped. The bad boatman is frantic as can be trying to heave that big bastard of a raft back, and the punters are swimming from arsehole to buggery. But the good boatman has time on the river, time in the rapid, and he waits for just that moment when his raft's pontoon smacks into a stopper or a wave, and at that moment when it is almost too late and his raft is almost set to capsize he snakes his body about and twists his paddle so that his purpose and the river's become one and he takes the raft where it ought to go. A great thing, a beautiful thing to see. Like ballet on water.

‘Yes, that's the word,' Pig's Breath continues. ‘Reputation. And I said, I promise this time there'll be no trouble. I gave my word to them, Ali.
My
word. And they said, All right, you can hire him, but only as a double B.'

‘Double B?' Aljaz hears himself saying.

Anyhow, that's all over and done with and what does it matter anyway, whether I was good or bad? I am not inclined to boasting, but not everyone can be a good boatman. The good boatman has to know himself, he has to know his punters and he has to know the river, he has to be able to read the water, how and why it moves, know what the particular forms of water - plumes, rooster tails, tongues, pressure waves - mean, what they tell about the nature and power of the rapid. He has to know why a rapid that is safe as houses at one level is as deadly as a tiger snake at another level. He has to smell and hear and love the river to know what the smells and sounds mean. I had the knowledge. And I had a name on the Franklin. I had a body that burnt and it astounded even me who inhabited it. I had a body that did what I wanted it to do, that was taut and hard and jumped and leapt and had time, that knew how to wait for just the right moment to act and then to seize that moment for all it was worth and make something magic happen. It was a terrific thing, that body, and the memory of it is enough to make me smile a little even while I'm here drowning.

But I was a poor guide. A good boatman, a wild man, a man of legend and hearsay, a man of reputation, yes, lordy-o, yes. But a poor guide. For now I can see that my concerns, my ways of seeing and knowing, were not those of my customers, were not even what might be of interest to my customers - were not facts, details, names of geological substrata and plants and animals, but feelings and intuitions that this tree, this
dacrydium franklinii
, was not the same as that
dacrydium franklinii
, that the same Linnaen specification did not denote the same spirit. That height was not the most important attribute of a tree or what had to be scaled in order to clearly see something. My poor punters. They came from other worlds, and mine did not open for them to come inside, not because I did not wish it, but because it was a world that would frighten them too much and they knew it far more than me. And so it went, trip after trip, a few good, a few indifferent, many bad like some extended Hitler Jugend outing, joy through ignorance, and once one fellow river guide called Needles had burst out singing ‘Deutschland Über Alles' and we had pissed ourselves laughing and the punters never got the joke, thank Christ, how could they?

Anyhow, what does it matter now? Only the memory, and that's a fragile thing. A name, be it a good or a bad name, washes away quicker than the peat that gathers in the potholes in the river rock, there to briefly swirl for an hour or two before disappearing, to be ground into the mass fecund nothingness of river loam.

‘Double B,' says Pig's Breath, ‘$52 a day. And I said, No, no that is an insult. He's my friend, he's hard up and he can guide and no one knows the river better.' He exhales theatrically. ‘Ali, I got you $87 and I can tell you I really went out on a limb to get that much.'

‘
Eighty-seven dollars a day?
' I can see now that I was trying to sound outraged and look outraged. We both knew it was outrageous. But now I can see what Pig's Breath is seeing: a sick man who has aged far more than Pig's Breath thought possible, a sick ageing man who needs work and any money real bad, even the crummy money he's offering, and who needs something other than work as well. Sometimes I'd get to thinking that this sickness of mine - my bad guts, my shaking, my aching head, the prickly odour that oozed out of my clammy skin - that maybe it came out of my soul and not my body. Of course who can say where bad health comes from. Who can? But that stench was something I couldn't exorcise with drugs or rest or other tonics for the body. I needed something aimed at the soul. But I didn't know that. And Pig's Breath did.