Highways to a War by Christopher J. Koch

joys, sadnesses and jokes of the Langfords forever, holding them like absorbent cloth, and that Ken would always be down there, plowing in the field by the hop glades.
    At sixteen, I was able to make myself believe this.
     
     
    I was Mike’s first close friend; and friends were to be of great importance to him, all his life. I would hear this many times, in Asia. But our friendship didn’t survive boyhood. As young men, we lost all track of each other.
    This was mainly because when Mike left school, he went back to work on the farm, and I moved to Hobart to study for my law degree. I heard nothing from him for years, and I decided, when I thought about him, that by now he’d be a farmer, and nothing else. That would be his life, as it was for his brothers. I could have phoned Clare, I suppose. I’m not entirely sure why I didn‘t, in all those years; but I’d learned that meeting the friends made in childhood usually proves disappointing; even a little embarrassing. Each has become someone else, and neither finds this very attractive.
    But when we were both twenty-one, I ran into him unexpectedly on a street in Hobart, and we stopped and talked. I’d just begun work as a solicitor with a Hobart legal firm, and I told him I was driving up to Launceston the next day to pick up some effects.
    Then he surprised me. He’d left the farm some time ago, he told me, and was hoping to be taken on by the Launceston Courier as a cadet news photographer. He had to go north himself in a few days, for a final interview.
    By the end of the conversation, it was agreed he’d travel up with me in my car.
     
     
    We left in the late afternoon. I was driving a battered Volkswagen that had got me through student days; beside me, in his bucket seat, Langford seemed a little too large for the vehicle. He’d become as tall as Ken, with the well-muscled body of an athlete, and I learned that he played Australian Rules football with a Hobart club. He spoke about his football as though it would interest me; it didn‘t, and we lapsed into silence. He was even less articulate than he used to be, I thought; I found his long silences baffling, and I told myself that he’d become quite dull.
    The Beetle buzzed at its modest top speed up the Midlands Highway, which is built on the track of the nineteenth-century coaching road. Soon we were entering the pastoral Midlands: an ancient, dried-up lake floor whose small, gold-grassed hills are occasional and rounded, their trees few. Open grazing country extended into the distance, the mountains blue on its rim, and still Langford’s silence continued. But finally he turned and asked me about my new job.
    I could tell he was merely being polite: I sensed that he could scarcely imagine why anyone would want to be a lawyer, and I answered briefly. Then I asked him about news photography. Why did he want to do it?
    the country manner. Then he said: “I like photography: I’m good at it. And I’d like to cover the trouble spots abroad.”
    He didn’t enlarge on this, and his silence enfolded us again. But as he’d spoken, I’d caught something in his expression that reminded me of the way he’d looked when he listened to newscasts on his radio in the sleepout, or studied Terry and the Pirates: a quick, fervent gleam. Perhaps he hadn’t grown dull, after all. His face had the strong planes of adulthood, and yet it was still very boyish: it still had the dreamy, almost infantile calm peculiar to the blond. Faintly smiling, he seemed to be gazing into the distances of some mythical sea: a place where I couldn’t follow him.
    By the time we drove across the old stone bridge that’s the entrance to the village of Ross, it was growing dark; and here I broke another silence, and asked him why he’d left the farm.
    But his face closed up; he peered out at the passing stone front of the Man o’ Ross Hotel, and simply didn’t answer. We were well outside the town before he spoke.
    “Something bad