Old Glory (19 page)

I went through Lock 6 at Trempealeau and the river changed again, into another crazy terra-cotta of islands, lakes and creeks, with the buoyed channel running close under the bluff on the Minnesota shore. Here the water, sheltered from the wind, was as dark as boot polish. I cut the motor, drifted, and tried to measure the depth by dropping a sinker on the end of my fishing line. The reel ran out of line before the sinker touched bottom. The river must be as deep as the bluffs above it were high—a submerged canyon. I wondered what was down there. Wrecked steamboats. Catfish as big as sharks. The rib cages of dead sailors. A million silver rings of stainless aluminum, pulled from the tops of all the Pepsis, Cokes, 7-Ups, Buds, Coorses and Michelobs, littering the black river floor like jewelry on velvet.

Just three weeks before, I had lunched with a New York journalist in a Chinese restaurant off Park Avenue. Our chopsticks had been clicking companionably among the bean sprouts, and he’d said, “I’m afraid you’ll find it all kind of samey.” If there was one thing the Mississippi wasn’t, it was
samey
. Cruising past Shingle Creek and Bullet Chute, I wished I could have taken the journalist and the man in London who had called the river “boring” as passengers—just for twenty minutes or so; they didn’t deserve more. The Mississippi could terrify, enchant, delude, but it was beyond the range of its character to bore or disappoint. I was a hundred and fifty miles into my trip; and I had done no more than nibble away at the very top of the upper reaches, but I was in the river’s grip. With each new mile, I could feel it tightening, the hold of a creature so complicated and devious that I could sense already that by the end of the journey I would be unlikely to have done more than scratch its surface—unless it chose to turn nasty and drown me somewhere along the way.

Now, with the river beginning to fluff up and an indecipherable change in the color of the trees and sky, I could feel it widening invisibly beyond the screen of islands on my left. I watched for a gap and saw the spread of Lake Onalaska, with the water sucking and spitting around the stump fields. Slowly the islands gave way to single trees standing on sandbars too small to chart, and the wind came straight across the lake, furrowing the river and sending slantwise breakers foaming in to the foot of the bluff. I tacked into them, then rode them back like a surfer, slowing my engine to their pace, until a windbreak of forest abruptly closed in at the head of the next lock and dam.

When I pulled into the harbor of the boat club at La Crosse, Wisconsin, I was jittery with the nervous relief of having
made it
. It was always like this: every time I arrived at a town off the river it was like docking at a foreign port after a real voyage. La Crosse was only thirty miles downstream from Winona; on a car ride one might easily have blurred into the other; but approached from the river they felt like cities in different countries. After all, the stretch of water that separated them was longer than the English Channel is wide; on that afternoon I could have just as well driven my boat from Dover to Calais and come halfway back. When I stepped onto the shore, I would notice that my hands were trembling, and later, when I came to speak, that my voice was trembling too.

I had heard voices from the clubhouse bar as I walked up the steps. Entering it, I knew that I’d broken into the middle of a scene. The faces of the figures on their swivel stools had taken on the sudden rigidity of people playing Statues. Everyone was trying to smile, but their teeth were clenched and the corners of their mouths looked as if they had been fixed into position with nails. One woman was bravely impersonating the attitude of a lady renting out a Hertz car on television, but the effect was marred by the drips of tears and mascara that were running down her cheeks. Only the bartender, rinsing glasses at the center of the horseshoe, gave the impression of being made of flesh rather than wax. Automatically, he laid out a clean glass on the bar as I came in.

“I’m sorry,” I said, stupidly staring from fixed face to fixed face, “do you have to be a member to drink here?”

The prospect of my leaving was evidently too dreadful for the group to bear. I was seized, dragged to the bar, installed in the middle of things. A drink was bought for me before I could begin to reach for my wallet. I was besieged by voices, all sounding as if they were set several semitones up from their usual register.
Where’ve you come from? England? Great. Fantastic. Where’re you going? We were there, in ’75
.
We
loved it. Hey, that your rig out there? Great. Great. You are? Well, sonofabitch!

Thickened by too many martinis, the voices went into a chorus of advertisements for La Crosse. Once more, as in Red Wing, I felt I was being treated as a prospective buyer of small cities:

“This is a wonderful town—”

“You ought to stay here for a month—”

“We have some
marvelous
restaurants … nightclubs, too—”

“You want to go on a tour around the brewery. That’s a fantastic place, the brewery.”

“We have fun here. It’s slow by comparison with New York, but we like it that way.”

“And I’m not prejudiced—I don’t even come from La Crosse.”

“This city,” said a man, wagging his stubby forefinger under my nose, “has got the best jazz in the country. And that’s not excluding New Orleans.”

“Right. You like jazz, you’ve come to the right place.”

From my stool I could see the river through the long clubhouse window. Night had fallen with the suddenness of a clicked switch. Under the dock lights the Mississippi had the viscous look of molten tar, its surface ribbed and scalloped with waves. A returning speedboat came bumping into harbor. Set beside the black sweep of the river, the voices around me sounded as tinny and disembodied as if they were playing on a radio somewhere. I nodded politely and watched the water.

“We’re going to Smitty’s—you want to come with us?”

“Why don’t we send out for chicken and pizza?”

Francie—whose blotches of mascara had now dried on her cheeks like powder burns—went to the piano on the far side of the bar. She swayed, bumped into tables and chairs, and collapsed in a heap on the piano stool. She played “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” I had to concentrate hard to pick out the tune from the welter of missed notes, bad timing and lurches out of key, but she managed to stumble to the end of it. Everyone clapped.

“Great! How about another, now, Francie?”

“It’s what she needs to do,” said a woman with brutally razored hair. “Everybody does what they need to do.…”

Francie attempted a Scott Joplin rag. She murdered one passage and tried to do it over again. Dah-di-dah-dah.
Dah
-di … Dah-ai-
dah
 … Dah … Dah … She slammed the lid on the piano.

“Hey, Francie! You were going great!”

“Great!”

“I’m shit,” said Francie. “And you guys all know I’m shit.”

“Francie!
Honey—”

She came over to me and leaned against the bar. I offered her my stool, but she shook her head. “I got to stand up …” she said, and laughed tearfully, “… for myself.” Her face still had the puppyish sweetness of a high school girl’s; she was in her mid-forties, and the flesh under her chin had gone to rolls of fat, but her crimped mouth under its Cupid’s-bow of rose-petal lipstick and her wide wet eyes gave her the air of someone who has never quite escaped from her teens.

“I’m not a drinker,” she said. “Seeing me here tonight you wouldn’t know that, would you? You wouldn’t. I know you wouldn’t.” She was having a struggle to pronounce her words. “Basic-ally,” she said, “I’m a very … happy … adjusted … outgoing … person”; and hiccupped into tears. I put my hand to her cheek, awkwardly conscious of the fact that my action was being closely watched from across the bar.

“Hey …” I said. “Come on, love—” She stared at me in total surprise. In Britain, addressing someone as “love” doesn’t mean very much; bus conductors do it all the time. In La Crosse, though, it had a different connotation. Francie, interested, immediately stopped crying. She pointed to the piano. “I could have had any career in music that I wanted. I could’ve been a teacher … I could’ve been a
performer
 …” And I saw the tears welling up in her eyes again at the thought of the
could-have-beens
.

A beefy fifty-year-old in a leisure shirt designed to display his fine tangle of graying chest hair to its best advantage decided that the intimacy between Francie and me had gone far enough. He thumped his glass on the bar and put on his loudest voice.

“Hey, you guys! You know the difference between the English girl and the American girl?” He waited until he had the giggly silence he needed. “The American girl says, ‘Honey, I’m going to come!’ But the English girl … well …” He looked across at me. “The English girl, she says, ‘Dahling, Ai do believe that Ai may be just about to arraive.’ ” The boat club thought this was a tremendous joke.

“And did she?” I said.

“What?”

“Arraive?”

He sniggered.

“Where was this? One of those hotel rooms you can rent by the hour around the back of King’s Cross Station? Or was it over the top of a strip joint in Soho?”

“It was a joke,” said Francie.

“I thought he was trying to boast about his sexual prowess,” I said. The face of the man was reddening fast with dislike. “Smile, Norbert,”
said the crop-haired woman next to him. Obediently, he showed his teeth. I decided that for the moment anyway, I wasn’t in immediate danger of assault.

Francie said: “As from tonight, I’m not going to be walked over anymore.” Soberer now, she told me her story. She’d been married for twenty-two years. She had four children. Her husband went on binges. This afternoon she’d arranged to meet him at four o’clock on their cruiser, to fit it out for their planned weekend trip to Wabasha. He hadn’t shown up. He never showed up. He was away in some bar across the city, drinking with the friends he never introduced to Francie; and since four o’clock she had sat here, revenging herself on him with more vodka martinis than she could remember.

“I made up my mind. If he wants to go to Wabasha tomorrow, he can go. I’m not going with him. For once in my life, I’ve made a decision. Let him go. Hal can go to Wabasha in his stupid boat. I’m going to get a divorce. Look! I said it! You heard me! I’m going to get a divorce. That’s the first time I’ve said it straight to myself in my whole life.”

“You’re so
tense
, honey …” Another big gray man had come up behind her and had started to massage her neck and shoulders.

“This is … Joe …” she said in her little-girl voice, “and this … is … Jonathan.”

“Hi, Jonathan.”

“Hi, Joe.”

“He’s my … therapist.”

He was working his hands down and around her ribs now, until they cupped both her breasts. “That’s right,” he said. “I’m her
therapist,”
and winked at me.

“Cut it out, Joe,” she said, squirming away from him.

“It’s only therapy,” Joe said.

“Go away, I want to talk to Jonathan.”

“So I know when
I
’m not wanted.”

“It’s not
like
that, Joe.”

“Never is, is it,
Jonathan?”
said Joe, removing himself.

“I mean I’ve got my whole life in front of me, haven’t I?” said Francie. “I don’t have to just sit around just watching Hal self-destruct. He’s had two heart attacks already. He’s been in Intensive Care. Look, I mean
you
wouldn’t be that hurtful to somebody else, would you? I couldn’t be that hurtful to somebody else. You know the trouble with him? He’s spoiled. He’s a spoiled child.”

Tired, still haunted by the grandeur of the river and oppressed by the squabbles of the clubhouse, I saw them all as spoiled children. The men were beginning to row again, their voices rising to a common pitch
of whining complaint. The woman with the jagged hair was trying to catch their attention. “The crap I’ve had laid on me …” she said, over and over again. “The crap I’ve had laid on me …” But the big boys in their fifties took no notice of her at all.

“He’s always thinking that the grass in the next field will be greener. He never says no to the next drink.”

The woman across the bar said, “You know what life does to you? It …” but she was cut off by Norbert, leaning across her to yell his contribution to the argument.

“They’re talking about the commodore,” Francie said.

“Poor guy.”

“I like you. You’re your own man. I’d be happy if I was married to a man like you.”

“You wouldn’t. You’d loathe it.”

“I can talk to you.”

“That’s what strangers are for. It’s always easier talking to a stranger.”

The bartender had the deep placidity of a man who had learned how to behave as if he were congenitally deaf. He moved among his bottles and glasses, flapping napkins, wiping invisible smears from the cocktail shaker, as if he were in an empty room. I envied him.

The woman opposite said—to me and Francie, now that she had lost all hope of capturing the interest of the men—“Sometimes, honestly, I just want to pass away … like
that.
” She brushed her hand across the polished leatherette of the bar and let it slide off into air. “Like
that
. I
do
. I really
do.
”

“I’ve learned something about myself tonight,” Francie said. “I’m going to get a divorce.” She said it rather as if a divorce were a particularly new and desirable brand of food processor. “You’ve helped me understand myself,” she said, putting her head against my shoulder.

“Hi there,” said Hal. He was glazed with alcohol. His expensive suit was askew. A tall, cloudless man, he had a vacant dignity about him—a quality that I suspected he must have inherited from somebody else. His father, perhaps, might have been a corporation president, and Hal had caught the habit of presiding. Francie wouldn’t look at him or speak.

“Well, Francie—here I am. I thought we were going to get the boat together.”

Francie slipped under his arm. She walked, steadily this time, to the window. She passed through a door I hadn’t seen and went out on to the levee. I saw her stand looking at the river for a moment, before she disappeared into the dark around the corner of the clubhouse. Hal and I stared after her, two fools together.