Turbulent Wake

by Paul E. Hardisty

  The young man spoke with the women for a long time, sometimes breaking into a long, animated passage, a story perhaps, the language a glottal melody, then listening as the women chattered excitedly back, eyes dancing. They gave their laughter freely, without hiding their mouths as women in some cultures were taught to do. Occasionally, they would glance over at the old engineer, but always their eyes would dart back to focus on the young man.

  After a while, the young man collected some food from his canoe. A bag of meal, tins of tuna, sugar, a joint of meat. He put them in a plastic shopping bag and handed it to the women. Evening was approaching.

  ‘Kuhepa,’ they said in unison, smiling broadly.

  ‘Kare nawa,’ said the young man as the women started up the rocky hillside.

  The old engineer watched them disappear into the bush, soles flashing pale. He turned towards the young man, who had started to unload one of the boats. ‘What is that stuff they rub over their bodies?’

  ‘It is the oil from mukange bark, the perfume tree, and red mud.’

  ‘Beautiful.’ He said it without thinking.

  The young man razored sweat from his brow with the edge of a mopane leaf. ‘These are the people you will destroy, old man.’

  The old engineer squared his shoulders and stood to his full height. ‘Spare me your righteous bullshit, boy. If you are so concerned, why are you here?’

  The young man stood looking down at his feet in silence, the boat’s bow line hanging from his hand. That had shut him up.

  ‘Yeah, that’s what I thought,’ said the old engineer, pulling his tent bag from the boat. ‘Now, how about we just stay out of each other’s way?’ He dropped the bag to the ground. ‘I presume we are camping here tonight.’

  The young man looked up at the sky, the black silhouette of the mountains, the bruise-yellow cumulus that troubled the darkening sky. ‘This is the best camp before the big rapids,’ he said. ‘It is too late to go on.’

  They unloaded the boats and set up camp. The old engineer pitched his tent on a sand ledge near an old baobab and used the last of the day’s light to update his field notes. After a while, he looked up, having made little progress. The young man was sitting on a folding canvas stool on a patch of grass by the water’s edge, looking out across the river, dabbing with a slender brush at a piece of card propped on a wooden easel. He gazed out over the river for a moment, then turned to the easel, dipped the brush into a tin on the ground and touched bristles to paper in a series of slow arcs.

  The old engineer looked in the direction of the young man’s study but could see only the smooth meandering curls of the river, the far shore already in shadow. Then he followed the young man’s gaze. Just beyond the shallows, a black-and-white bird was perched atop a branch that protruded from the water. Unremarkable, no larger than a fist, it had a long, bladed beak too big for its body and a small black crest. He went back to his notes.

  Night came on, cool and cloudless, a blanket of stars. The Milky Way carved a frosty equatorial arc above them. The old engineer sat by the fire. Steaks sizzled on a steel grill. The young man reached into the icebox and pulled out two cans of Windhoek lager and passed him one. They drank in silence, watching the flames.

  After a while, the young man passed him another beer, and opened his second.

  ‘Don’t you own a camera?’ asked the old engineer.

  ‘Too easy,’ the young man said, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. ‘Tourists all day clicking cameras, trying to capture everything, take it home, own it. And then all night at the fire with blue faces, delete, download, edit, not looking up at the stars or the bats swooping their heads. They are in their own country already, making Facebook of themselves.’

  ‘You know,’ said the old engineer, swirling the beer around in the can, smiling to himself, ‘that’s the first thing you’ve said that makes sense.’

  The young man smiled, lifted the can to his lips and drank.

  ‘I’ve taken thousands of photographs over the years,’ said the old engineer. ‘And you know, I’ve only ever kept four.’ He thought of the faded picture in the little silver frame on his desk in the cramped room he used as an office. Helena, the day they were married, so long ago now, an eternity – her hair flying in the sea breeze, face freckled by the sun, that impossible aching smile, a swathe of Gulf of Guinea blue in the background, the only testament now that it had ever happened. And how stupid he’d been to think that he might recapture even a fraction of what he’d had with her by remarrying. You only ever get one chance at something so rare. If you’re lucky. He looked into the night. ‘I don’t know why I even keep them.’

  The young man reached into his pocket and pulled out a Ziploc bag. Inside was a blue fabric wallet. He slid out a small square of paper and offered it to the old engineer. ‘I have only one.’

  A tall blond man in military field uniform stood on a faded dirt road. Next to him was a small boy, naked but for a loincloth.

  ‘My father,’ said the young man. ‘The war killed him.’

  That explained something. The old engineer said nothing, handed back the photograph.

  That night, he hauled his mattress out of the tent and threw it down on the sand, as the young man had done, and lay watching the constellations turn overhead until sleep took him. He woke as first light crept into the sky. He pulled on his shorts and walked barefoot down to the fire.

  The young man was standing naked in the shallow water next to one of the boats. He looked over his shoulder, smiled and slid into the water. After a few strokes, he turned and waved. ‘No worries, old man,’ he called. ‘Crocodiles are far.’ Then he dived, flicked his feet in a powerful kick and disappeared.

  The old engineer stood at the water’s edge and let the river lap his feet. After three days on the river he felt fitter than he had in years, and without the tyranny of a mirror, he allowed himself to imagine that he was as he had been all those years before, not the overweight, greying, pallid office creature he had become. He waded out across the muddy bottom until he was waist deep, scrotum shrivelling. The boy was almost mid-river now, head down, slicing across the glassy surface. Fuck it, he thought. He closed his eyes and dived, kicked out three long strokes and surfaced, blinking in the sun that had broken over the hills. The water was cool, invigorating.

  At first, the grating hinge of his stroke was awkward and he fought for breath, trying to follow the young man. He could feel the current pulling him downstream. About halfway to the other side he slowed and opened up into a choppy breaststroke. The young man was walking on the far bank now, leaving a trail of dark dimples on a shoal of brilliant white sand. He looked up and waved. The old engineer lifted a hand and made a clumsy sweeping motion, a wave of sorts.

  When he finally gained the far shore, he had been carried far downstream. Here, the bank was thick with tall reeds and he floated on his back in an eddy, breathing hard. The sky above was clear and blue, the bank alive with song. Birds flitted and wheeled across the water and between the dense weave of green stalks. And there, just above him, perched on the tip of a reed, were two little black-and-white birds, like the one the boy had been painting. They looked down at him for a moment, twittering in a high-pitched trill, and then darted out over the water. He watched them climb high above the river and then stop and hover at treetop height, wings flaring, bodies up, heads bent, peering down into the water, holding position with minute corrections of pitch and yaw, their delicate tail feathers twitching in the breeze. They were like toys, models of themselves. He could not look away.

  Suddenly, one of the birds folded back its wings and fell. It plummeted like a dart towards the smooth silvery surface. His muscles tightened. Could something so small survive the impact? Inches above the water the bird wrenched out of the dive and skimmed the surface before climbing to rejoin its mate.

  He had been in the water a long time. He was shivering. He wrapped his arms around his body, treading water, and looked back across the ri
ver. Where was the kid? The water was dark and murky. Looking down, he couldn’t see his own legs, and suddenly he felt horribly exposed, limbs flailing just below the surface like pale lures. He should go back. But the birds were still there, hovering above him, watching him, tracking upriver now, swooping in small arcs as he followed. How honourable they seemed, these tiny creatures. How noble. Was it the cold, playing tricks? He swam on, following the birds. They were moving slowly enough for him to keep up, a game. Each time he got close, fighting the current, they swooped a bit further upriver.

  He had just reached the white shoal when one of the birds flared, stalled and flipped into a vertical dive. This time he knew there would be no reprieve. The bird hit the water like a bullet and was gone. There was barely a sound. He was surprised by the delicacy of the impact. If he had blinked, he would have missed it. And then the bird was climbing again, wings trailing little diamonds of water, a tiny silver fish in its beak. The old engineer watched it disappear out over the reeds.

  By the time he reached camp, he was exhausted and cold, strangely elated. He could feel his muscles rippling, twitching as he waded up the bank. It was a long time since he had felt this way.

  The young man was by the fire, squatting on his haunches, watching him, a wide grin dawning on his face.

  ‘What have you got to smile about?’ said the old engineer with a scowl, covering his nakedness with a hand.

  ‘The river, oud man. It makes you alive.’

  The old engineer coughed. ‘Let’s get going,’ he said. ‘I have work to do.’

  Soon they were on the river again, moving steadily with the current. Another hot, cloudless day spread over them. The old engineer unfolded the map across his knees. The big rapids were still about ten kilometres away. Letting his boat drift in the current, he scanned both sides of the riverbank through his binoculars. Ahead, a zebra pelt of dark, mafic dykes striped the salt-and pepper granite bluffs on either shore. He noted the feature on the map in pencil, then folded and stowed it. He was about to turn his boat towards the Namibian shore when the young man pulled alongside.

  ‘Over there,’ said the old engineer, indicating with his chin a place where the bluffs had been worn flat by the river, a horizontal slice of the underlying rock laid bare. ‘I need to take some measurements.’

  ‘Before you do, have a look,’ whispered the young man, pointing to a sandbar on the Angolan side. The old engineer squinted across the water.

  ‘Do you see? At the waterline.’

  The old engineer raised his binoculars and brought the bank into focus, tracked upriver. A crocodile lay motionless in the sun, head to water. The pale skin of its midsection was stretched tight to bursting.

  ‘As big as your canoe,’ said the young man.

  The old engineer’s stomach knotted. He let the binoculars fall on to their strap and picked up his paddle. ‘I’m not here to sightsee,’ he said, altering course towards the opposite bank.

  The old engineer landed his boat in a small patch of black gravel on the bank, stepped over the side and drew the canoe up on to the shoal. The bedrock here was sculpted smooth by the water, hot through the soles of his sandals. He set off towards the dykes. By now, the young man had drawn up his boat and was bounding after him. The old engineer crouched next to the first dyke and took out his compass and notebook. The rock was heavily fractured.

  ‘What do you measure?’ said the young man, peering over his shoulder.

  The old engineer stood, snapped his compass shut and pushed the notebook into his pocket. He looked at the young man. Gone was the face he’d first seen, first judged. This was the face of a small boy, a boy without a father. And, ever since Helena had died, so long ago now, he’d been a father without a child. She’d had every right to leave him, of course, the way he’d treated her, the things he’d done. And in his guilt, he’d compounded error with error, hadn’t done the things he should have, hadn’t been there for her, worked to put it back together. And then the crash. He remembered hearing about it in the news. He was away, working in Egypt. And then when the man from the embassy had come to tell him the news, it was like a hand reaching inside him and grabbing his heart and tearing it out of his chest. What she’d been doing there that day, in a rented car with a man more than ten years her junior, he’d only ever been able to guess. And so, as penance, to punish himself for all his failures, and for the boy’s own protection, he’d banished the only person he had left. He looked down at the rock, swallowed hard. ‘Fracture orientation,’ he said. ‘Number, character, spacing.’

  The young man nodded. ‘This is important?’

  The old engineer closed his eyes, watched photons swim red across his eyelids. Opening them again, he said: ‘What?’

  ‘These fractures, they are important?’ the young man said.

  The old engineer blinked once, twice. ‘Fractures create permeability and instability. Neither is good.’ It was becoming pretty clear to him now, based on all the data he had collected, that the thing wasn’t going to work. The geology just wasn’t right. And if they went ahead and built it, as it appeared they were determined to do, large-scale failure was inevitable. It would only be a matter of time.

  The old engineer stood and started towards the next set of fractures. The young man followed close behind.

  ‘Do you want to know the name of that little bird, old man?’

  The old engineer stopped and turned around. ‘What?’

  ‘The little black-and-white fishing bird. I saw you watching him, this morning in the river.’

  The old engineer sighed and took off his cap and ran his fingers through the bristles of his hair. ‘Why do you insist on thinking that I give a shit?’ He turned away and kept walking. He could hear the young man’s naked soles soft on the rock behind him. He pushed on. The young man followed. He gave it fifty more metres and then stopped and spun around and stared the young man in the face. ‘Goddamn it, kid, just let me be, please. I can look after myself. Go back to the boats.’

  ‘I am a professional,’ said the young man, standing hands on hips. ‘If something happens to you, the responsibility is with me.’

  The old engineer laughed. ‘Professional? You don’t even know the meaning of the word.’

  ‘Say what you like, old man. I am glad you did not use the helicopter.’ The young man waggled him a sign he’d seen other young people use: the thumb and little finger extended from the fist like the horns of a bull. He had no idea what it meant. ‘Meet at the boats. But come soon. The big rapids we must cross before darkness.’ And then he was gone, loping like a gemsbok back towards the river.

  By the time the old engineer reached the boats, the young man was busy tying down and making fast equipment and supplies, decking over spray skirts from bow deck to stern thwart. It looked like he was preparing for a rough ride. The old engineer removed his sandals, tied them to the safety line that ran the length of the starboard gunwale and, without looking up, said: ‘Let’s get this over with.’

  ‘No worries, old man. The water is not as angry as it looks. Follow the line I make. Stay close. You wanted to see the river; this way is best.’

  As they approached the bend in the river, the old engineer could see why the project team had chosen this site. The profile of the banks had steepened. Massive granite outcrops framed each side of the constriction, ideal for anchoring buttresses. Any number of spillway and penstock options presented themselves. Approaches for equipment looked good. He scanned the walls with his binoculars.

  They moved into a deep, sunlit canyon, drifting with the accelerating current. The sound of the rapids filled his ears, echoing from the cliffs that towered above them on both sides now. The rock was heavily fractured here, the water’s edge a litter of splaystone from the cliffs above. Mist and spray shrouded the water ahead, rainbows dancing in and out of existence like phantoms.

  He watched the young man manoeuvre his boat to the middle of the river, flicking the paddle with quick movements of h
is forearms. The water surged into smooth, standing waves, scalloped surfaces of translucent green hemmed with a lacework of froth. The boat flexed beneath him. He plunged the paddle blade deep and pulled until his muscles burned, following the kid’s line down the heart of the river.

  And then he was around the bend, careening towards the rapids, white churning foam as far as he could see. Spray fell in sheets and soon he was soaked to the skin, but he was holding his boat straight, still following the line. The young man looked back and flashed a broad smile. The old engineer grinned and followed the kid into another set of steep-sided waves, the bow pitching skyward and then tumbling down to bury itself, before emerging again, over and under, until finally he was through.

  The young man was waiting for him in an eddy of calm on the Namibian side. The old engineer drew alongside.

  ‘Good, ja?’ said the young man, water beading on his face, eyes shining.

  ‘Good,’ said the old engineer. Good.

  The next rapid was slightly longer, the waves taller. The old engineer followed the young man down into the core of it, working the blade of his paddle instinctively, those years spent on the Capilano and the Fraser with his father there still, memories drilled into his muscles. Out the other side, into calm water, they drifted side by side, saying nothing, the diamond spray drifting over them, atomising the sunlight. The old engineer breathed deep of it, as if this vapour were youth itself, quickening his heart, healing the damage of years. As they drifted downstream, the sound of the next rapids built, funnelled along the valley.

  ‘The next one is rougher,’ said the young man. ‘Stay low in the boat and paddle strong. Follow me.’ As the curve opened up, the rapids came into view. It was as if the river simply ended, the green lassitude of the flat water ruptured white, a war of churning waves and flying spray, beyond which nothing existed.

  The kid pointed downriver. ‘This big rock is the danger. Can you see it?’