Death of a River Guide Read Online Free PDF Page B

she said it would take time to heal but that time could never entirely fill in the hole, that she had said it not because she knew nothing better to say, but because she was right. For a long time I had been sick, and she had found me once and tried to stay with me, still as the moon. And I, like some errant satellite, had drifted away to return only when it was too late. Far, far too late.
    Â the first day 
    I watch the river trip proceed in front of me. On the first day the river was so low they had to drag their rafts most of the seven kilometres down the Collingwood River, to the place where it ran into the Franklin. At such a low level, the Franklin at the junction was also little more than a dry creek bed studded with occasional rock pools. The first day was hard in every way for Aljaz. Physically it was a torment, because the punters had neither the wit nor the inclination to lift and drag the two rafts, each of which weighed hundreds of kilograms, so it was he and the Cockroach who had to do most of the labour. His body was unequal to the hard work. His soft hands burnt from where he pulled the nylon deck lines. His back knifed pain when he lifted the pontoons. They camped at the Collingwood’s junction with the Franklin, in the rainforest above a small shingle bank. The night was so clear they slept without tents and Aljaz knew that tomorrow, with no rain, the river would only be lower, their bodies stiff and bruised and their work even harder.
    That evening they sat round the fire drinking billy tea and Bundaberg rum and watching the moon, waxing to near fullness, rise high enough for its light to silver the river valley. Their weary bodies felt bathed in mercury. The fire and the banks of rising rainforest were mirrored in the monochrome river as a dancing daguerreotype. They traded stories back and forth, the guides of river lore, of feats great and ridiculous, of floods that awoke them with a roar in the middle of the night, the river banking up around their tent before washing it and most of their equipment away, to deposit it at some point downriver atop a cliff, along with uprooted trees and dead snakes and devils. Of droughts in which the river was so low the rafts had to be dragged along the dry bed for four and five days before enough water could be had to float them. The punters’ stories tended to be smaller and sadder. There was Rex from Brisbane, who three months before had taken a large redundancy to leave his position with Telecom and now was totally lost. ‘I am only thirty-five,’ he repeated, ‘only thirty-five. What am I to do?’
    â€˜Keep travelling,’ advised Derek. ‘With money you can see or do whatever you want. Every spare cent since the divorce I put into travel. What an age it is!’
    No one else much knew what Rex ought do, except for Rickie, who said he had a very good broker with whom he could put Rex in touch come the end of the trip. Sheena suggested maybe Rex didn’t really have that much to worry about, but the others were more sympathetic.
    There was Lou’s story of working as a crime reporter on the old Sun and being sent to interview a crim who had a contract out on him. The crim lived in a squalid bedsit in Fitzroy and only went out twice a day, once to shop at a Vietnamese store up the road, the other to eat tea at a Syrian café. ‘Why don’t you run?’ Lou had asked him. ‘Why don’t you just do a bunk and go to Darwin or Dubbo or somewhere they won’t find you?’ The crim sat on his bed the entire time and seemed gentle and pleasant. He agreed it would be the sensible thing to do, but life, he suggested, wasn’t always such a simple thing. ‘This is my home,’ he said. ‘I live here,’ he said. ‘And I’ll die here.’ So he did. Two days later they came while he was lying in bed and, as Lou put it, vitamised his head with shot.
    At the time Lou told that story I had