Old Glory (21 page)

Mr. Dunlevy took me across the street to his office, a long gloomy corridor of a room which smelled of must and printer’s ink. His grandfather’s original press stood in the middle, surrounded by the wooden founts of Victorian type in which the paper was still set up. The last issue had come out yesterday, and I looked at the headlines:
LIONS CLUB HAS SUNDAY PICNIC. RITES HELD FOR LEO J. COLLINS. CLASS OF
1959
MEETS AT CLANCY’S
. The news inside was, among other things:

There were advertisements for pig auctions, guns, chain saws, silo covers, corn cribs, barbed-wire fences and hog panels, along with the week’s menus for meals-on-wheels and school lunches.

Grandfather Dunlevy must have started his paper at much the same date and in much the same spirit as the first proprietor of the
Kansas City Star
. For in 1880 Lansing was clearly bidding to become the state capital; it had been scooped by Des Moines by a mean trick of history. The fine red-brick and stucco buildings along Main were an announcement of grand things yet to come. Streets with names like “Capitol” and “Washington” could not have been designed to hold the little frame houses with their peeling paint that lined them now. Pigeons lodged in the derelict cupola of a closed church. Twentieth-century Lansing was squatting comfortably in the nooks and crannies of the ambitious Victorian city. Main Street was full of unpretentious survivors from the past. In Hogan’s Barbershop a farmer was being given a wet shave with a cutthroat razor while he read the front page of the
Journal
. Krieger’s Variety Store, under a ragged maroon awning, sold notions pegged on strings in the window: packets of seeds, cheap wristwatches, skin creams, latex sweat absorbers to line one’s shoes. The new illuminated sign for a Speed Queen launderette looked like an incongruous trespasser. Perhaps it had come from Dubuque. There was no indication anywhere that Lansing thought of itself as quaint or picturesque; it was just quietly vegetating. Even the button factory was still going—though the buttons now were imported from Japan, and all the “factory” did was employ women to sew them onto printed cards.

John Dunlevy led me up the bluff on the town’s north side. I asked him what Lansing people did for a living nowadays. There were a state electricity project, a fish farm, a small auto-parts factory. Farmers came in from the hills to shop and dine out, so there were more stores and restaurants than one might have expected in a town with a population of only 1,500. A handful of professional fishermen supplied the fish market on the levee which drew customers from miles west across the state.

Lansing had set out to be a big city; it was, apparently, much relieved to have failed. In 1880 every two-bit town in the West had wanted to become a metropolis; a hundred years later, the big thing was to be a handsome village,
LIONS CLUB HAS SUNDAY PICNIC
was a headline to boast
of—far better than the tales of murder, theft, riot and rape that covered the front pages of the newspapers of those towns which had succeeded in their original ambitions.

“Look,” said Dunlevy, “you know any place else where you can get a view like that?”

We’d arrived at the top of the bluff. The forested cliff on which we stood went down sheer into the river, and the Mississippi Valley was laid out like a relief map in brilliant acrylic color, framed by a tangle of ferns, flowers, oaks and mulberries. Its tesselated pattern of islands and slackwaters had the fantastic elaboration I had seen before only in theory on my charts. The unbroken wooded bluffs on the Wisconsin shore, five miles away, showed as a hard, carved edge of shadowy green. Below us, every strut and hawser of the Lansing suspension bridge was perfectly repeated on the mirror surface of the water, and the interlocking V’s of a tow’s wake, just downstream of the bridge, were innocent doodles on the glass. The morning sky was empty except for a single pale streak of high cirrus like the track of a faraway airplane.

“Don’t you envy me my trip?” I said.

“If I didn’t have a paper to get out, I might just ask you to give me a start as a deckhand.”

At that moment, no one in his senses would have passed up the chance to go down that river. Looking south, into the lovely unexplored tangle of wood and calm water, I thought of the happy impulse that had brought me here—and found myself faced with a conundrum. When I was a child of seven I thought that I was imagining the Mississippi. Yet seeing it now, in all its old pictorial clarity, I found it hard not to think that somehow I had remembered it. The fit was troublingly exact; and there were details in it that I could never, surely, have got from
Huckleberry Finn
. I had to remind myself that I have no belief whatsoever in ideas of precognition. One can’t remember the future, whatever J. W. Dunne may say in
An Experiment with Time
. For a few moments on the bluff over Lansing, though, I felt a nervous tremor of disquiet. The particularity of the dewdrops on the ferns, the rock-crystal blue of the water, the secrecy of the islands … it was like wiping the dust from the glass of a picture in an attic and suddenly recognizing the painting that used to hang on the nursery wall. How it had made its way from there to here in the course of thirty years was a problem that I had no means of solving. It was just very odd, and I would have to leave it at that.

Sliding by through the islands, I heard the dry snapping of rifle fire in the forest. I pulled out of the channel, ran under a dripping railroad
bridge and rowed the boat up a weedy lagoon where little pickerel scattered in fright as I splashed past. An old man with a broad reptilian face was sitting up at Withey’s Bar when I entered; he was wearing a grubby red cravat which was held in place with a pearl pin, and he rested one mottled hand on a silver-topped walking cane. He looked as if he’d been left behind fifty years ago or more by a touring Shakespearean stock company.

I asked him what the shooting was about.

“Shooting?” he said, cupping his free hand to his ear. “I hear no shooting. No bullets, praise the Lord, have yet come … ricocheting … into the precincts of this quiet tavern. To confess the truth, sir, I move little in this world. I stick to my bar stool, departing only to empty my bladder in the porcelain temple there. But if you assert that there is shooting, I will believe you, my friend; let there be shooting. The question, however, remains: what is to be shot? Women? Children? Dogs? Cats?”

“It’s the first day of the Wisconsin squirrel season,” said the bartender. The old man’s style of speech had evidently ceased to amuse him; he appeared not to notice it, even.

“Ah,” said the old man, “we are enlightened. The shaft of dawn breaks upon the mind. What’s getting shot? Squirrels are getting shot. Out in the woods, squirrel blood is being drawn, in bucketfuls.”

“People
eat
squirrels around here?” I said.

“
Eat squirrels?
” the old man shouted, banging his stick up and down on the bar floor. “We do not ‘eat’ squirrels, sir. We may regale ourselves upon them. We might be described, on occasion, as consuming them. We do our humble best to honor the noble squirrel. We make, at the very least, a repast of him.”

“What do they taste like?”

“Good,” said the bartender.

“The bartender, sir, is a man from whose lips words fall like rocks. He has no poetry in him. The precise savor of the flesh of your squirrel is a subject that only a brave poet would assay.” He kissed the inside of his fingers and flourished them in the air. Then he closed his eyes, tilted his head back and affected the smile of a dead saint.

“Don’t pay no attention to that old gasbag,” the bartender said. “He’s been going on that way ever since I can remember. They got a whole ward full of guys like him up at the county hospital. How come they ain’t got you there yet, hey? Best place for you, I reckon.”

“Sonofabitch,” said the old man, with his eyes still closed. “Put another Schlitz in that goddamn glass, will you?”

The bar was filling with the Saturday-morning hunters and their dogs
and guns. The first squirrels of the season were skinned, split open and laid out on a grill tray. Cooked, they looked disconcertingly like black bats. I was made to try one.

“Back legs is the best,” said the bartender.

The few scraps of meat I was able to disentangle from the bones were tough and tasted vaguely of overhung pheasant. I noticed that the old man dismissed the squirrel that was offered to him with a lordly wave.

Below Lock 9 there was a lunch counter in a wooden shack that ran out over the river on stilts. The woman who sat by the coffee urn was painting a grinning face on a homunculus she had made by glueing pine-cones together.

“Now, that is Art, Charlene,” said a fisherman in a one-piece suit of green rubber. He looked as if he might be a piece of sculpture himself. “You’re a real artist, you know that?”

“It’s just something I read up in a magazine,” Charlene said, giving her doll a toper’s scarlet nose. “Just seemed a kind of cute idea to me.”

“Hell,” the fisherman said, “that’s an original artwork you got there. You take that to Dubuque, or Davenport, or some big city, they’d pay you fifty bucks for it. Maybe a hundred. There’s big dough in artworks.”

Charlene looked across at me. “Betcha I can tell where
you’re
going,” she said. I hadn’t realized that my destination was so clearly written on my face. I thought, in fact, that the whole point of the river was that it was too long, too winding and digressive, to yield any certain destination. “We’ll be going down there later too.”

“Where?”

“The Falling Rocks Walleye Club Annual Pig Roast. Ain’t you with them?”

Enchanted by the name, I sought it out. A mile or so downstream, a cluster of jonboats was pulled up on the Wisconsin shore, and I climbed the path up the bluff to the highway and the Falling Rocks Lounge. In a rough clearing behind the bar, the pig roast was circled with campers and pickup trucks, as if the Falling Rocks Walleye Club were taking the usual precautions against Indians. The hog was turning on its spit over a barbecue fire, and trestle tables were laid out in lines under the trees. It was a last-day-of-summer celebration; already the four-o’clock shadows were long and deep, and the bright synthetic colors of everyone’s holiday clothes were softened by the low sun. One could feel that fall was just a windy day or two off now; I could smell it in the barbecue smoke and hear it in the tindery rustle of the leaves.

I joined a table of families, feeling a shade regretful that I wasn’t myself accompanied by a large fair-haired wife and two slender children in
identical jeans and T-shirts, the girl in braids, the boy with braces on his teeth; the basic qualifications for membership of the Walleye Club seemed comfortable and reassuring ones.

“Don’t you think it’s just beautiful here?” a woman said.

“We come from seventy miles away, over in Iowa,” said her husband. “We love it. Where we come from, you know, the land’s so flat that all you ever see is water towers and grain elevators. Here, heck, it’s beautiful. It must be just about the prettiest place on the whole Mississippi River. We think so, anyhow.”

“So the Walleye Club has more to do with the landscape than it has with the fishing?”

“Oh, some of the guys, they get kind of serious about the fishing, but for most of us, no; it’s this bar here, and this bluff, and that water.…” That water, set out in a wide swath at our feet, had changed its color from morning blue to afternoon green; it was the same deep viridian as the forest that surrounded it.

“So when did you last catch a walleye?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Must be a while back, now.”

“Years,” said his wife.

We lined up to collect our slices of charred meat on paper plates. I wasn’t sure whether the echoes I caught of the wagon train at camp for the night—the stockade of drawn-up trucks, the communal meal from the open fire in the center—were deliberate or not. If I’d voiced them, I would have been laughed at; but it must have been nice, I thought, to have one’s ancestral past so near at hand that one could unconsciously re-create it at the most ordinary picnic. That was an American privilege, and a European loss.

An old man with a stubbly white beard said that I had to come and meet “the Mississippi Songbird” in the bar.

“When do you sing?” I asked her.

“When I got enough drinks inside me. I ain’t hardly started yet.”

“This girl here, she’s got the most ripplingest voice you ever did hear,” said the old man. “She’s really something else.” So I bought her a Seven and Seven—a Seagram’s 7 Crown and 7-Up.

“You just wait till you hear her. Now: I got a kind of hobby. I can tell a man’s age, exact. You want me to tell you your age? I’m never wrong. I’ll lay you a bourbon on the rocks that I can say what you are to your nearest birthday. Okay?”

“Go ahead,” I said, already reaching for my wallet.

“You’re … This is a specialty of mine. I made a kind of study of the subject. Now, you … yep, I got it. You’re forty-one years old.”

I have rarely been less pleased to win a bet.

“I’m not. I’m thirty-seven. There’s my passport.”

The man investigated it suspiciously. “I ain’t never wrong,” he said. “Now, you could’ve got by for thirty-seven if you’d taken more care with your teeth. That’s how I tell. Don’t look at nothing else; look at a man’s teeth, ’cause teeth don’t lie. And I’m telling you, you got the teeth of a man of forty-one.” He snapped my passport shut and handed it back to me. It was clear that he expected me to buy the drinks.

“I’m waiting for that bourbon,” I said.

“Hell, I don’t know. Them teeth you got, they sure look like forty-one years old.” He sounded as if he thought that I had deliberately set out to cheat him by cultivating my beastly trick teeth. Grudgingly, he set me up with a whiskey and lectured me on dental care. It was not one of the happier passages of my trip. The time, too, was coming dangerously close to sunset. I said that I had to leave.