Death of a River Guide

by Richard Flanagan

  I can see that Pig’s Breath knows Aljaz well enough to see that Aljaz desperately wants to visit the Franklin River country, that there is a need in him, which Pig’s Breath does not have, to go back there, and that this is his only way of doing it. And while Aljaz sits there trying to look as if he is chewing over numbers, Pig’s Breath can tell that what he is in fact doing is smelling the river, hearing it run, watching the rain mists rise from its valleys, drinking its tea-coloured waters from his cupped hands. It is so obvious that Pig’s Breath knows Aljaz thinks him a fool, and that Pig’s Breath, not being a fool, is able to use this knowledge to his advantage. He says nothing about Aljaz’s desire to go back to the Franklin. He says something entirely different.

  ‘I’m sorry. You can always refuse.’

  I can see Aljaz looking and giving the small laugh of a man who knows he has been trapped. ‘I don’t have a lot of choice.’

  Pig’s Breath drums his fingers and says nothing.

  ‘When did you say the trip goes out?’

  ‘Wednesday morning.’

  ‘Wednesday. So I’ve only got today and tomorrow to buy food, prepare and pack all the gear?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Pig’s Breath, who suddenly leans forward over his cluttered desk in a movement almost aggressive. ‘But you look as if you’re not interested.’

  Aljaz feels suddenly tired. His guts start cramping up again. He is beaten. He knows it.

  ‘No,’ says Aljaz. ‘I’ll take the job.’

  ‘You’re a crazy Cosini,’ laughs Pig’s Breath.

  Overnight a westerly change blows in and people awaken to the smell and sight of water falling to the hot earth and then rising as soon as it hits as steam. The sky is black, but beneath the languid curling dark clouds the low sun shines hot and hard. Hobart sways as if mesmerised by the battle between the two fronts, the hot harsh northerly and the cold dark westerly. The elements combined throw a weight upon the city so that it can move but slowly. Aljaz wakes early and breakfasts on apricots that he had simmered in sugar and water the night before. He meets the Cockroach at Pig’s Breath storeroom for the second and final day of packing gear for the trip. It is tedious, frustrating work. The storeroom is a mess because Pig’s Breath refuses to pay for a storeman and things have been simply thrown in at the end of each trip, uncleaned, unsorted, uncared for. The Cockroach, who has had no breakfast, eats two tins of smoked mussels which he finds beneath a mouldy tent and almost immediately falls ill. He vomits in a supermarket car park when they later go to buy more food for the trip. Somehow they manage to sort and pack all the gear and food, and mid-afternoon they head out for a drink.

  In the dark bar there is little noise. All is hushed, save for the low crackling of the caller on the radio giving the results of the fifth from Moorabin. Aljaz and the Cockroach Krezwa sit on stools leaning up against the bar of the New Melbourne, an old pub facing an uncertain future, soon to be either demolished or renovated as a backpackers’ hostel. The publican, once hearty and strong enough to do his own bouncing, is these days a broken man who sits behind the bar pouring for the few who still patronise his palace of vanquished, yellowed dreams.

  As a refuge from the hurly-burly of the city, the New Melbourne’s time is done. But for a month or more perhaps, people such as the Cockroach and Aljaz can still sit down within its plywood-panelled walls and drink and talk in quiet. In the corner sits an old man, much like the old men in the corners of bars everywhere, whose future is as uncertain as that of the pub in which he has drunk the now unfashionably small six-ounce beers for the last twenty years. As the old man pulls the beer up to his lips in a jerky movement, his head stutters around to see who else is in the bar, in the manner of a chook in a henhouse checking out who has come to steal its eggs. The Cockroach asks for two more beers. The Cockroach is big and he is ugly. He is also young, perhaps twenty-four at the most. He has the body of an athlete and a face that looks like it has been trodden upon. He is all river guide, all Teva sandals and polar-fleece garments, suitably baubled and slightly filthy to impart the impression of experience, bangles made of brightly coloured knotted cord, silver earring with a scimitar hanging off it, weak eyes and strong hands, long laugh and slow voice. The buck teeth are a discordant element, but they have the effect of rendering his unfortunate face happy and cheerful.

  The Cockroach seems to accept that Aljaz is to be the head guide without rancour, for which I can see I was clearly grateful, for it must have been obvious to him how out of condition I was, and, once upon the water, how long it was since I had rafted. Perhaps it is this gratitude that makes Aljaz more talkative than normal. The Cockroach talks about whitewater rafting methods Aljaz has never heard of. Aljaz decides to come clean with the Cockroach.

  ‘To be honest, I’m totally out of touch,’ says Aljaz. ‘I’m long past it.’ He looks up at the Cockroach. ‘I only got the job because they have to have someone who knows the river and there was no one else available. That’s all.’

  The Cockroach shrugs his shoulders. It doesn’t worry him. ‘I’m just keen to get down there to have a look,’ he says. They talk slowly, quietly, for although they are unknown to each other, they know that for the next twelve days they are condemned to live and work closely together. I notice now how the Cockroach is staring at Aljaz as if trying to put two and two together, and I know what the Cockroach Krezwa is thinking. He is reminded of a tempestuous affair he had the previous summer with an art school student who had a postcard of each of her two artist heroes stickytaped on the bedhead above her pillow. In moments of passion the Cockroach had occasion to focus upon these pictures while his body was transported elsewhere. The Cockroach Krezwa is thinking how Aljaz looks (with the exception of his very large aquiline nose, which is magnificently and uniquely his own) like a slightly podgy cross between the two great artists featured on those postcards: Vincent Van Gogh and Frida Kahlo. As if the pictures of the two famous painters had bizarrely merged to form this one obscure river guide - the Dutchman’s intense, driven features and prickly red hair combining with a dash of the Mexican’s swarthy visage and proud refusal to accept her fall from physical grace to make Aljaz Cosini. A little mad, a little possessed, sure only of the certainty of his terrible destiny. Strange. And unsettling. The Cockroach wonders what this Aljaz would paint were he an artist. Probably a very large mess, he concludes. The Cockroach’s thoughts stray back to more earthy memories of what occurred beneath the postcards and from these I am thankfully spared. Strange that I never saw such obvious and famous likenesses glare back at me from the mirror. I am not entirely sure when I started to look that way; presumably it can only be recently, because I’d always fancied myself better looking and more easygoing than that driven, demented face I now see.

  The Cockroach senses that Aljaz is troubled, but he does not ask Aljaz what his troubles are. He wonders whether Aljaz is seeing a woman. He feels how something in Aljaz is like a broken spring that does not drive anything but only pricks things. The Cockroach decides to make a joke.

  ‘Bound to be an accountant called bloody Barry,’ he says, staring at his index finger drawing lines on the condensation on his beer glass. ‘Always is. Fair dinkum, I did six trips in a row on the Tully and on each trip there was an accountant called Barry.’

  They laugh. The barman passes two more beers across the bar. ‘Yeah,’ says Aljaz quietly, ‘always plenty of Barrys.’

  ‘And doctors called Richard,’ says the Cockroach. ‘I had two in the same boat once.’

  ‘And dentists called Dennis,’ says Aljaz.

  ‘From Bankstown,’ says the Cockroach. ‘Always dentists called Dennis from Bankstown.’ The Cockroach grows more animated. ‘And don’t forget the nurses,’ he says. ‘You never get a nurse. Never. Always, always two nurses.’

  ‘And you don’t ask any of them what they did last week. Because that’s talking about work and they hate that.’

  ‘Christ, no. You say, So hey, Barry, where did you get to last holiday? An
d he likes that, because in his heart of hearts he only wants to pretend to you and everyone else that he is something other than the boring bastard he is. In his holidays he can pretend to be something he’s not. And so Barry wanks on about skiing in Austria or trekking in Tibet or ballooning in Bhutan, and all I can think is pity the poor underpaid bastards that had to wetnurse you through all that, because, Christ knows, if you were left to your own devices you’d kill yourself in an hour.’

  The radio gives out the results of the tote on Randwick and announces that they are two minutes away from a start at Flemington. The Cockroach tells a story about himself in the mistaken hope that Aljaz might do the same.

  ‘I went out with this girl once, while I was working up on the Tully it was, and it turned out she had worked as a pro. And she was saying how it’s just the same if you’re a pro, like you never let on to the punters - they even call them punters, can you believe it? - you never let on what you are really thinking. And you can’t help disliking them even when you want to like them, because if they weren’t wankers they wouldn’t be paying for it in the first place, they’d be off doing it themselves, not having to pay people to do it for them. They want to fuck your mind, that’s what she said, and that’s the part you don’t let them buy. Because they can go, but you’ve got to stay and do it again and again and you can’t go. Anyway, I am talking shit, I know it. But it was like we had something in common, she being a pro and me being a river guide. I liked her, you know. Liked her a real lot.’ He smiles and drains his beer. ‘When people asked us what we did, we’d always say we worked in the tourist industry.’ He holds a finger up to the barman, who nods and picks two fresh glasses out of the tray beneath the bar. ‘Which I suppose was the truth of it.’ He stops looking straight ahead and turns and looks at Aljaz.

  ‘We’re all punters,’ says Aljaz giving a little smile. ‘At the end of the day, all of us.’

  ‘What’s the trip like anyway?’ asks the Cockroach.

  ‘A joke,’ says Aljaz.

  When Aljaz had begun river guiding this was the cardinal rule among all guides: don’t ever take it seriously. Treat it as a joke, Gibber, the first guide he worked with, had told him, and Gibber was right, it was one big joke that went on for nearly a fortnight, a joke whose essence was that only the guides ever understood what was funny. The big joke was made up of innumerable smaller jokes played upon the punters. Rules were one part of the joke. There were rules all the way down the river. There were rules for eating and sleeping and even for shitting, which had to be done in a plastic bag (which would be carried out at the end of the trip) at a point distant from the campsite, always selected by the guides, who would sometimes, solely for their own amusement, set it at the end of a precarious and long trail along cliff edges. The punters loved the certainty, order and rhythm that the rules brought to the world of river and rainforest, which to them seemed so uncertain, chaotic, and discordant. Beyond that, and the amusement they afforded the guides, the rules were largely useless. Once Aljaz had grown sick of forever issuing edicts covering every aspect of daily life, from how they ate to where they slept, and he had told a group of punters that they could work it out for themselves as they went down the river. The punters rightly blamed him for what ended up being a lousy trip.

  He knew things were changing, that for many of the new guides the ditch wasn’t a joke at all and the only jokes they knew were the ones they had committed to memory to retell in the raft or around the campfire for the punters to laugh at. And when Aljaz had tried to explain all this to a young guide who had been preparing for a day’s rafting trip in Pig’s Breath’s storeroom, when he had tried to explain that the whole thing was a joke, the young guide had not understood. No it’s not, he had said, it’s serious. But that’s the point of the joke, thought Aljaz, but he did not bother to say it. Those who refused to recognise the joke became part of it.

  The Cockroach smiled. ‘They’re all jokes, mate,’ he said. ‘Otherwise we’d take ’em seriously. Otherwise it’d be so fucking serious you’d die from the seriousness of it all.’ True, thought Aljaz, true. So true it pings. Jokes are what separate them from us and all their shit about being in harmony with the wilderness. Jokes destroyed all their systems for understanding, for knowing this land, and made it once more strange and unknowable, irreducible to human ideas. Jokes, Aljaz further thought, are all we have to dissolve the lies that come between us and the earth we walk upon. ‘They’re all jokes,’ said the Cockroach, ‘every fucking river I’ve ever fucking rafted.’

  They drank another two beers in silence. But the Cockroach knew what Aljaz failed to see about himself: that for Aljaz the joke wasn’t funny any more. The art of being a good river guide was looking after your customers while remaining indifferent to them. Sometimes, though loath to admit it, the Cockroach even ended up liking some of his punters. But Aljaz seemed to hate them, and that made the Cockroach uneasy. Most of all, he seemed to hate himself. The Cockroach swivelled around on his barstool and looked at the swarthy, nuggety redhead gone slightly to fat sitting there next to him. The Cockroach thought Aljaz, with his large, slightly crooked nose, looked a little like a broken-down boxer. The Cockroach had worked before with river bums who were sour, but Aljaz was more than sour. The Cockroach had a nose for fear and he could smell it on Aljaz. But fear of what? The Cockroach began to wonder how this trip with such a driven man would end. After a time, he decided that it could only be badly.

  There wasn’t an accountant called Barry. There weren’t two nurses. There were two accountants, one from Melbourne called Derek, and one from Brisbane called Marco. There was a doctor, but he was clearly under some misapprehension as to his position. He wore an earring and insisted on being called Rickie. ‘It amounts to the same thing,’ the Cockroach whispered, as they met the punters for the first time at the trip briefing in Pig’s Breath’s dingy office. There was Sheena, who was a dental assistant. There was a thirty-year-old farmer called Otis from outback South Australia. There was a journalist called Lou. There were some others, but Aljaz couldn’t remember their names. He was not interested and he was a little drunk from the two hours spent drinking with the Cockroach in the New Melbourne.

  It was the first meeting between guides and punters that Aljaz loathed more than any other. It depressed him, and coming as it did after two days of frantic work rushing around town, buying a fortnight’s food for ten people, then stripping it of its packaging and waterproofing it by wrapping each piece separately in three layers of plastic bags, then carefully packing them into large black plastic barrels. After two days scouring the chaos that was Pig’s Breath’s storeroom for knives and woks and billies and petrol cookers that worked and tents that didn’t leak and paddles that weren’t bent and pumps that had pressure and first-aid kits that were not wet and repair kits that were not empty, after all this hectic, crazed, frustrating work, they had to meet the punters and impart to them an air of serene organisation and calm control, while all around them was blind panic. And as always, the punters looked so pathetic, so hopeless, so dependent upon the quiet leadership of their guides. The Cockroach took refuge in seeking to be efficient.

  ‘Now,’ he said, ‘who’s going to be needing to hire a wetsuit?’

  the third day

  The pork satays that Aljaz had prepared for the evening of the third day had gone rancid in the heat. Aljaz delved down into a large barrel, pulling out bag after carefully packed bag of food, until he at last found a piece of silverside that smelt only a little bad. He washed the lump of meat in the river, then boiled it for an hour, after which he diced it into cubes and tossed it into the wok on the fire along with some canned tomatoes, kidney beans and a more than generous serve of chilli powder.

  ‘Ekala,’ said Aljaz in reply to Derek’s questions as to what they were eating for tea. ‘Traditional Brazilian dish. Aged silverside is the closest approximation available to smoked llama meat.’ Derek looked on with interest and Rickie said that he would have t
o visit a Brazilian restaurant when he returned to Adelaide.

  After they had eaten the meal out of their plastic bowls the Cockroach told them the stories about Tasmania that they wanted to hear. About the grandfather who slept with his daughters until his son chained him up, beat him every morning until he was mad, then used him as a watchdog. About the son who carried his dead mother in a sugar bag to the nearest town to register her death and, finding her too heavy, stopped at the wayside and did what he did with all the roos he killed and carried, gutted the corpse and then proceeded on. The punters greeted the stories with nervous laughter and nods and shakes of the head, meant to convey bewilderment at such horror but which was rather them affirming that Tasmania was as they had always conceived it in their ignorance, a grotesque Gothic horrorland - as if they knew the stories already, which really they already did. The Cockroach tells the stories for effect, not because he believes them but because he knows they are what the punters want, and his job is to satisfy their needs. Aljaz says nothing. Other nights on other trips he has told the same stories. They ought be honoured by their repetition and by their currency. But they are not and Aljaz dislikes them, dislikes telling them. What is there to say? It is too hard to say something different, to tell a new story that no one has told and to which he doesn’t know the response of either the punters or himself. Those stories are too hard. They come from something too close.

  I can hear a sobbing, a soft sobbing in the darkness, a swish of fabric. Thank God it’s not Jemma but a tent on the Franklin. Aljaz is looking inside the tent, his torch light beaming upon the expansive sitting form of Otis, whose farmboy’s body moves gently up and down with his weeping. Outside in the darkness the rain softly thrums the tent’s taut nylon.

  ‘Otis,’ said Aljaz, ‘what’s the matter, mate?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Otis.