Dreamboat Dad by Alan Duff

acoustic guitar
— or used to till my father made me rich.
    Our landscape strange, eerie, with its human and creature-like noises:
someone throttled, a life being slowly squeezed by a terrible force,
conspirators whispering, desperate sips of breath like drowning, a geyser
roaring — wasted sight spectacular stolen by the dark.
    Shuffling figures, giggles, kids and youths, snatches of conversation
from somewhere and nowhere, ghostly shapes flitting in and out of
existence, someone lifting a steam box lid to take out cooked food, a
stooped figure near the big boiling cauldron silhouetted and swishing, I
know by the posture, a mutton-cloth bag of vegetables; figures coming
and going from the baths keep getting claimed and revealed by the steam.
Laughter, always laughter that only the sky can claim.
    People in old weather-beaten armchairs and battered sofas on porches,
spilled down wooden steps, they chat and smoke and hum, whistle, or just
contemplate. A foot taps in time on hard surface to the accompaniment
of strummed guitar, Django Reinhardt style, I know it from one of the
singers in Henry's group who plays brilliant guitar self-taught, and who
gave me a few impromptu lessons. Archie's advice: The key is to let go
to the music, kid. The other to stretch your fingers so to find chords and
combinations others don't, that's why Reinhardt is so good, because he
pushes the limits of finger extension. With his deformed hand too.
    Every one of us knows each step of the way, where the ground is
prone to collapsing, little lurking fissures recently opened up, hot spots
giving warning of worse to come soon, collapsing areas.
    Up on the raised level of poured concrete surface and concrete bath
tubs, heads and bodies in and out, laughter and talk aplenty; we recognise
each other by shape and the dimmest overhead light the town council
begrudgingly gave us, three lamps over a two-hundred-yard section.
    To the changing shed, built on a working bee weekend by the senior
men's rugby team at Merita's urging — she found the money from
somewhere. Told the people, among ourselves we can't be dressing and
undressing outside in the open like primitives, and can't bathe when it's
raining anyway because our clothes get soaked. No windows, just an open
slot at eye level to look out of, a place acquiring the odours of our bodily
leavings.
    A different modesty is required when everyone bathes nude, females
covered by a towel right till the moment of immersion, males cupping a
hand over genitals. In the warm waters a baby gently sloshed and Sunlight
soap the size of its torso rubbed over its skin. Lovely; if we're lucky we'll
get a hold and coo into its little innocent face staring up at the chosen kid
with a canvas of stars on his head.
    Old tattooed crones whose crinkly forms you brush against, who speak
in Maori or English, tell stories of enemies thrown off Totara Hill bluffs,
the usual of the lost status of captured warriors made slaves. Of the pride
we had as a race isolated from the rest of the world till the first European
explorers came. Of our beloved original village twenty-five miles away
but gone forever when the mountain blew up when Merita was a six year
old.
    Together, life in its different stages and ages, we stick with each other
all the way to the grave.
    A gathering of naked bodies in the dark with light from the universe,
the nearer moon, maybe someone's lit a couple of candles and put them
on the sill of glassless window in the changing shed, and ember pinpricks
of cigarettes smouldering in the water-sloshing dark are still a form of
light. And all light is love.
    Mata and her boyfriend, their child inside her, will be driving through
this night. I guess it is day in Mississippi if we're night here. Take our
turns at being under the unspeakable vastness of black canopy peppered
with stars, smeared with galaxies, being continually investigated by curious
bright men trying to understand the impossible distances and epic