The Glass Canoe (11 page)

WHY?

I caught Alky Jack laughing in his corner one morning after he'd done his sweeping and made his little fire of papers and cartons. His few teeth gleamed crazily in his red-pink mouth. His tongue was coated with white and the shine of spit on the mucous surface of his mouth was somehow sinister, even while it looked surprisingly healthy. He had the profile you ought to see on coins, but don't. Wise, experienced, corrupt. The sort of thing that gives you confidence in a leader.

‘Money is shit,' he said. ‘Piled up, it stinks. Spread out, it's good fertiliser. The rich hoard it up, they're at their richest when they die.' He chuckled.

‘An illustration of the neatness principle. The two lines of the graph, their increasing piles of goods and decreasing bodily powers, meet at that point. Subtract
the cost of the funeral and the tax on death, and they pass on their net value to their heirs.'

In a way it didn't matter that it was me who was there to listen to him, he was thinking aloud most of the time. The others wouldn't stand still once the subject got away from races, football, the latest murders or direct quotes from the papers. They got suspicious if something sounded like an opinion that didn't have the backing of what was on public show.

‘The hoarders never feel emergencies, yet emergency is with them all the time. Emergency, or the coming shortage, is the word for death. When they lay up tinned food or money or possessions or land or companies or insurance against the evil times, they're counting on the sureness of death. These here—' he waved a hand at the regulars—‘they never think of it. They lift the glass and banish it from their minds.

‘The rich never hoard smiles or sharing or honesty or love or generosity. They hoard more and more employees, more machines. For them, not even death and taxes. They hide from the penalties of life and death by forming companies. Evade tax, evade death duties—since a company can't die. They can play both sides in a war and not be hanged. Or even called to account.'

Even I began to get uneasy. It was just a lecture.

‘It's all been said before, but no one learns, no one remembers. The land's in mortal danger when the
nation's richer and the people just as poor. Rich men grow like mushrooms overnight and overnight die. But once a strong, independent lower class decays, they can't be resurrected. Their absence cuts the country's legs from under it, because they are the muscles of the country, they do the work and they do the consuming.' Then he returned to his pet theme.

‘If you could maybe sometime tell me why the whole damn thing, here and elsewhere—now that we've destroyed the Australians who shared everything with each other—why the whole economy depends for its existence on competition instead of generosity, remembering that we're manipulating goods and resources that are not ours, but are on loan from the planet.'

I couldn't tell him why. Instead, I lifted my glass, which contained the golden river, and let the torrent flow over my tongue. Which became the red of the river, a river leading through dark underground tunnels, entering bubbling caves, uniting with dark streams.

At least Alky Jack was pushing himself, trying to be taller than when he was born, even if only in talk and thinking. Trying to work something out, something about how men should live. We stayed the same, did nothing. It was a bit poor, somehow.

LAST TANGO WITH ERNIE

His latest boss had a confidential habit. Ernie was a bit shy about letting it out to us, but we finally got his guts.

‘He's got you in his office there and he gets you to look over his shoulder at some figures. He keeps moving the paper so you have to stay pretty close in order to focus, then he does it.'

‘Does what?' says the Great Lover, looking up from the crossword in that morning's Tele.

Ernie was so long answering that we guessed.

‘Dirty bastard,' said the Great Lover virtuously.

‘He's a flip,' said the Darkfella, grinning.

‘A dead set vagina,' said Mick, who thought this was a clever thing to say.

‘Have you read a book this year?' said Sibley. ‘Do you buy medicines? Do you attend church?'

‘Piss off, Sibley,' said the Great Lover.

‘Do you believe in God or the Bible?' persisted Sibley.

Mick turned to him.

‘Out.'

Sibley out.

‘Why don't you do it to
him
?'
I suggested to Ernie.

‘He's the boss,' Ernie said. ‘Sometimes he even says Excuse Me before he does it. He's rotten, I tell you. And there's a girl just come to work there, trying to get my job. Making a play for the boss, but so far he hasn't given her a tumble.'

‘That's what he's told you,' said old Hugh, who'd just come in for his rum and beer chaser.

‘Well, he waits till she's about to come in his office and he lets one go, then when she comes in he moves a bit away from me, and smiles at her then catches the scent of it again and looks at me with a frown and back at her with a smile. He doesn't need to point, the way he does it. He might just as well tell her it was me that farted.'

‘She might know it's him, but just goes along with it because he's the boss,' the Darkfella said helpfully.

‘Next time he does it, roar out That's wet at the edges! So the rest of the office can hear. That'll put his weights up,' said the Great Lover, who didn't understand that someone wouldn't be game to dob the boss.

We were no help to Ernie.

‘Why don't you just run out of the room when he does it, and hold your nose?' said Tom, who'd got wind that the Great Lover was in the pub.

Old Hugh hit the nail on the head.

‘Get friendly with this sheila, if she wants your job. Take her out to a dance or something. Does she like dancing?'

‘Yeah,' said Ernie. ‘Loves it.'

‘Most of the bitches do,' old Hugh said sourly. ‘Then get her to a dance and show her you like her. You'll learn a lot about her. Study her. Then if you're smart enough you'll get a line on how she thinks. If any of 'em think. Then you might stand a chance of keeping your job.'

No one thought this was a good idea, but a week later I found Ernie had done just that. The girl had gone with him, probably to find his weaknesses so she could undercut him. She was well on in her cost accountancy course, whatever that was, and Ernie started to have nightmares about her not only getting his job but getting the boss's job too. In which case he'd have to learn dancing.

He was standing at the red bar one Saturday afternoon and sneaking salt on to his hand to lick off when the bar manager came along and tapped him on the shoulder.

‘Phone,' he said. Ernie gulped guiltily at his palm,
looked round and saw we all noticed his little aid to thirst, and made off to take the call. He stuck one finger in the offside ear to blot out the pub roar, and craned his head forward to listen. I noticed his head rear up and Ernie say something that looked like What?

Then he came away from the red phone back to the red bar. He didn't look at us, just went towards his glass. When he got to it he didn't see it. He turned blindly away, went towards the front door, stopped, shook his head, turned round and went the other way out towards the car park. He wasn't so much walking as propping on stiff legs and this gave him an appearance of lurching.

‘What's up him?' Flash asked. No one knew. We looked away, and went on talking about this and that.

It wasn't much later that we heard a commotion outside. It was no effort to turn round and wonder what it was all about.

Someone called, ‘It's Ernie!'

We couldn't see Ernie. We went out. Maybe a car had backed over him.

When we got there, a ring of spectators surrounded someone on the dirt. I got closer and there was Ernie, lying full-length, drumming on the ground with his fists and feet. There was dust all over him, he was raising a cloud all round. We moved back a bit out of the dust.

He didn't stop. Maybe he was having a fit. Some moved back a bit further in case it
was
a fit. I pushed
in, bent down and grabbed his shoulder, trying not to breathe the dust in.

‘Ernie! What the bloody hell's the matter?' I shouted. He was making a sort of moaning sound, like a retarded person that gets excited but can't speak actual words.

‘Shut up!' I yelled, and he slowed down a bit. ‘What's up?'

‘Mum,' he said. ‘Me Mum.' And began the noise again.

‘What about your Mum?' I said, more quietly.

‘Dead,' he said. And as he got the word out his voice rose in a shrill scream. It startled me, I moved back a bit myself. Then it settled down to a lower noise, still not making any actual word. Each time his breath ran out he sucked in more and began again, going up high, then lower. After a bit, when he regained his breath, he didn't go up high, but started low and got up to the previous steady note and held it. This was worse than the scream.

I didn't know what to do. The spectators had moved well back.

‘His Mum's just died,' I said to them when a suitable break came in Ernie's sound.

No one said anything for a while. Then they began to leave. I heard someone say, ‘My Mum's dead too. I didn't go on like that.'

When the mob had gone, one individual hadn't moved.

Blackie sat there. As the last of them left, he turned his head a bit and back at me and said, They're only humans, they don't understand.

Ernie stopped his noise, but continued the drumming with his hands. His legs stopped just after he stopped the noise.

Blackie looked back to Ernie, with his head slightly on one side. The head came back to straight after a while and changed over to slightly on the other side. His eyebrows were up in a funny way; down at the outside but up in the middle. He wasn't a spaniel, but that's how his eyebrows were, like a spaniel. He wasn't anything, really, apart from the labrador in his past. But I suppose most of
us
are pretty well mixed, too.

He was sitting on his rump and his back legs curled round on the bare dirt. He took a sort of half-slide, half-step towards Ernie. His tongue went inside his mouth, his mouth shut and he took a big swallow.

His mouth stayed shut for a bit as he watched Ernie, who was getting tired by now. Blackie looked down at the ground for a few seconds, extended his arms and put his head down on his hands looking at Ernie. I guess he could feel Ernie's sorrow drumming on the gravel.

He took another big swallow and gave a very quiet, restrained moan. You couldn't call it a howl. A sort of groan.

Then he got up, turned his body away with his
head still looking back at Ernie, and his mouth still closed. One more swallow and he walked away quietly, looking back.

It wasn't till he got out of sight round the corner of the pub and to his headquarters near the bottle department that he allowed his mouth to come open and his long pink tongue to come out and loll in the sunlight as he breathed.

As if he knew that an open mouth and lolling tongue near Ernie's sorrow looked too much like a grin. His eyebrows stayed up in the middle, but you'd never mistake him for a spaniel. He stayed there a long time, thinking about Ernie.

Blackie didn't have time to get to know
his
mother: he was taken from her when he was very small.

We didn't hear much from Ernie for a while. Some said he was off the grog, others said he was drinking in a pub with carpet on the floor. He was caught in the clutches of this girl at the office, trying to keep near her, trying to learn to dance, even starting to imagine himself in love with her.

I'm prepared to believe he knew as much about being in love as I know about micro-biology. Anyway, as the saying goes, he did his nuts over her. I know, I took the trouble to go after him and find out.

I watched them together. They say love is blind, but she knew exactly what she was doing. I saw the
way she looked at him. In his case it was blind. But he didn't look at her enough. He didn't watch her.

There he was, walking along, and when he spoke to her he didn't look and when she spoke to him he'd answer the words, but not the look in her eyes, or the little grin that made her mouth mobile. He looked straight ahead, like some idea of man that he had, as a hunter that looked for dangers and left details to women.

He should have watched her.

If she made those faces at what I said, I'd have known.

She sucked him in properly, and all the time he was going to dancing lessons she was out with Ernie's boss, which grew to four times a week. She had to stay home with her mother on Saturday and Sunday because her old man was drunk all the weekend and her younger brothers and sisters needed their older sister to keep them steady and to be an example, and to do the housework because her mother took turns.

That's what she told Ernie. He swallowed it.

People like Ernie go along for years, masculinely looking straight ahead, blind to the dalliance at their sides and under their noses. Tunnel vision, they call it.

One Monday morning Ernie was late getting off to work. As he rounded the corner at the top of the hill in Parramatta, there they were, they'd just put their bags
in the car and she was closing the door of the motel room. Laughing.

Ernie got to work first. The girl had her mother sick in bed, she said. She came in a few minutes after the boss and explained to him why she was late. She looked happy and alive, and Ernie did notice one thing. As she turned to talk to him, her face shed the happy look and put out this sincere, quiet, wide-eyed look. Ernie was blind to the spiritual meaning of it, all he saw was the contrast with the previous expression.

The following Saturday he went to her house. It was dark already. Her brothers and sisters were not there, her old man wasn't there, her mother was just going out, and the girl getting ready to go. He waited for the old girl to depart, then walked in the door.

The girl was making bathroom noises. On the way through the kitchen he picked up the handiest thing, which was a jaffle iron. You know, the thing with two metal halves like soup plates in which you put the sandwich then close the other half over it, slip the catch at the end of the two handles, and hold it over the gas to toast.

He crept up to the bathroom. She was naked, bent over, drying her legs and feet, one of which was up on the side of the bath. He hit her on the head with the edge of the iron and she dropped like a stone, hitting her face on the side of the bath on the way down.

Having her limp like that turned him on, but he stuck to his guns. He hauled her into the kitchen and looked round for something to fix her with.

Maybe one of her brothers was a camper, for high on a ledge over the room-divider was a hammer and several iron pegs.

With a tea towel round the peg, he positioned it a little forward and above her left ear as her head lay on its side on the linoleum. He hoped it was a wood floor.

He made a heavy blow with the hammer and was sickened at how easily the peg went through the temple and plunged through the brain. He lifted the head. No, it hadn't come out the other side. Two more blows and it did. Then came the hard work. Try as he might, he couldn't get the spike through the floor. He lifted the lino at the seam, found a crack in the floorboards and hammered the spike through the crack.

Why he wanted to have her head nailed down was a mystery he couldn't explain. Perhaps he'd read it in a book once. Or in the Bible.

They didn't catch him straight away. He started coming to the pub every day, staying till ten and staggering home. It made a big mystery in the papers, and they all had a great time with it.

Luckily, the boss had an alibi. He was at home waiting for the girl to drive to his place, where they'd get into his car and go on from there. He waited and
waited, and since she wasn't on the phone, he took his wife out.

It took the police till next Friday to get around to Ernie. He hadn't even left a fingerprint in the girl's place. But at eight o'clock when he saw a car pull up in the car park, and two plainclothes men walk in the pub, he ran.

That was the end of Ernie.

At the trial they asked him why. It wasn't her two-timing him, it was because he was convinced she already had his job.

Next time anyone saw him was one busy weekend—for the coppers—when they had so many fighters and drunks and over-the-limit drivers in the cells at the police station that they put the overflow into maximum security Parramatta.

Danny was our representative.

‘They had a special lounge room ready for me along the corridor past all these cells with little windows and placards out front with the crim's name and what he'd done, like murder, and how long he was in for. Maybe the information was for the visitors. Anyway, it was a fluke. I saw Ernie's card. The old brain acted quick. I dropped my handkerchief, which they let me keep, to the floor. I bent to pick it up and as I was straightening I took a quick look in the little window. He had a room to himself, he was sitting on his little bunk, looking at nothing.

‘I call out, Hey, Ernie! It's me, Danny, and the screw with me hauls me away to my room, which I share with eight others, the scruffiest looking lot you ever see. Drunk, sick, nasty. I wasn't game to go to sleep. Ernie didn't answer.'