Old Glory (27 page)

Thwap!

“Got him.” And the old man would point happily to his trophy—a tiny blackish mess of crushed thorax and torn wings. “All afternoon I been after that pertickler rascal.”

“You did
what?
” said my neighbor at the bar when I told him about my trip and where I had left the boat. “Holy shit! Hey, you guys, listen to this. Go on, tell ’em what you done.”

“What the hell difference does it make?” I said. “I just lent my boat to some people for the afternoon.”

“This guy here, you know what he done? He give his boat away to a buncha goddamn niggers down at Shubert’s. A loada niggers from
Chicago
. He told them they could go fishing in it.”

“Well, there’s one born every day, ain’t there?” A man down the bar in jeans and snake boots tipped his curly cowboy hat to the back of his head.

“Way I look at it, maybe you done us some kind of a favor. Because all them Chicago niggers, I reckon they’ll be saving up the carfare for England. The news’ll go all around: there’s a whole goddamn country full of guys you don’t have to bang over the head to steal from, they just come up to you and
give
their stuff away.”

His wife put down her glass. “That ain’t right, Harry. Them black people, I think they’re more honest than us. You don’t know no blacks. You never talked to a black person in your whole goddamn life.”

“Shit,” said Harry.

“I don’t know what it is about them,” said the man in the cowboy hat. “but they always catch some fish. No one else does, but the Negroes, they get some. You never see a Negro coming back with no fish.”

“Where was you supposed to be going?” said Harry. “
Norlins?
I’m
telling you, there’s only one way you gonna get to
Norlins
now, and that’s by cab.”

“You got a helluva big mouth, Harry,” said Harry’s wife.

“Now, this is something I got to see,” Harry said. “You want me to give you a ride down to Shubert’s? I’m gonna run you right down there.”

“Thanks. I’d be grateful for that. But not till ten to four.”

He looked at his watch. “By ten of four, that boat of yours’ll most prob’ly be in Davenport or someplace, being sold off for scrap.”

Two beers later, we rode to the landing in Harry’s pickup. He was chortling all the way. A hundred yards short of the riverbank we had to wait at a railroad crossing for a long freight train to go by. “I could get out here,” I said. “No, you don’t,” Harry said; “
this
I wanta see.”

The boat was neatly tied to the pontoon. On the seat there was a jagged scrap of brown wrapping paper, weighted down by a pebble.

GoT 2 GoD cAT HAv A GoD DAy

I showed the paper to Harry. He studied it suspiciously and at length.

“One thing about them niggers,” he said. “They don’t spell too good.”

Ten miles downstream I beached on a shore of riddled clam shells at Bellevue, on the Iowa bank. It was the kind of town whose essential character and history were written clearly on its face. In the decrepit little hotel, the old men in the bar were talking in German. When I turned on the light in my room I saw that the switch itself was set in a plaster molding: an angel in robes and wings was leaning over the tongue of the switch to pat the heads of two American cherubs in school uniform. Above my bed hung an octagonal glass chromo of Christ the Shepherd on which someone had stuck scraps of gold foil and velvet around the frame. So Bellevue was German and Catholic and had once had a button factory. Through the dusty window, I could see the town laid out at my feet: there was Riverside Drive, then Second Street, then a grassy railroad track; and beyond the track lay a tangle of white frame houses. People were sitting out in their small, square yards in foldaway picnic chairs, looking much like the snakes and the turtles as they took in these last rays of summer sun.

It was a good town for sleeping in. Below Christ the Shepherd and the angel, I slept profoundly. I surfaced to church bells at ten thirty, too late to join the faithful. Not since I was a child had I felt such a stir of guilt at missing church, but when the carillon of falling notes suddenly
stopped in mid-arpeggio I slept again, to dream of shivery seven-o’clock Communions, of the smell of the censer and the starched linen napkin which covered the Host. The bumpy greystone floor around the altar was a terra-cotta of ancient graves and memorials. Thos. Edgecumbe, Bart.… his wife, Eliza … some worn inscriptions in Latin that I couldn’t construe.… The dead clergymen and baronets would have been contemporaries of the first settlers of Virginia and New England; as I’d knelt in my surplice, serving the officiating priest, I had thought of them more as elderly aunts and uncles than as relics of a distant history. I piped my responses in the same voice that I used to recite multiplication tables: “Lord have mercy upon us and incline our hearts to keep this law.…
Christe eleison
.… It is meet and right so to do.…” The priest, my grandfather, in his gold-embroidered cope, raised the wafer of rice-papery bread and broke it. Pigeons roistered in the belfry, and my mind drifted from the ceremony; under the Sign of the Fish, I thought of roach and dace and the big pike who skulked at the bottom of the millpool.

It took me till lunchtime to return to Bellevue, Iowa. The river was ridged and whitecappy, and my boat was banging on its mooring. I walked back to a bar on the bluff. The bartender was taking an Anacin tablet.

“I got a headache for some reason; I don’t know why. I ain’t got anything
in
there.”

She was framed by cracker-barrel mottoes in pokerwork.
IT ISN’T SMART TO ARGUE WITH A FOOL—LISTENERS CAN’T TELL WHICH IS WHICH. DON’T CRITICIZE THE COFFEE—YOU MAY BE OLD AND WEAK YOURSELF SOME DAY. MOST FISHERMEN ARE LIARS EXCEPT YOU AND ME AND SOMETIMES I’M NOT SURE OF YOU
. These and other ready-made witticisms formed the staple of so much bar talk: they were swapped like old coins gone smooth with use, and valued the more for their antiquity.
IF YOU’VE GOT NOTHING TO SAY, IT’S BETTER TO SAY NOTHING
. Mottoes like this provided a basic grammar for everyone’s one-line quips. You were supposed to deliver them in an expressionless growl, staring straight out front from under the peak of your plastic cap.

“What you want, Werner?” said the bartender.

“You know goddamn well what I want,” said Werner, pushing out his glass for another shot of Coors. He was in his eighties, with a sly face like the top of an old hickory walking stick. He’d been born and raised in Bellevue, and I asked him if he could describe the town as he remembered it in the tens and teens of the century.

“This town … it was goddamn good—once,” he said, and didn’t speak for another five minutes. The only sound in the bar was that of
Werner’s bristly lips chewing at his glass of beer. “There was nine taverns,” he said. Then: “There was a harness store.” Another mighty pause. “Three hardware stores.”

“The button factory?”

“Yeah. There was the button factory. There was another factory, made sonofabitch
pianos
. They had thirty pianos a day coming out of that place. Pinewood, they was; pinewood pianos. There was a big logging business here. Every goddamn woman then, she wanted a piano. They must have turned half them logs into pianos for the womenfolk to play their goddamn hymns on. Sonofabitch. Yeah. In them days, you got a dime of beer and there was goddamn crackers and cheese along the bar.” His misty eyes focused wickedly on the bartender. “They give you
free
crackers and cheese. Now they don’t give any sonofabitch away. This town … this town’s gone all goddamn to hell.”

“I know why I got a headache,” the bartender said; “I been listening to Werner.”

“Sonofabitch.”

Two men came in. The previous day, they had both been to the funeral of a friend named Earl. With long intervals between sentences, they set about constructing Earl’s family tree.

“Earl’s father … he was George, weren’t he?”

“His widow … she lived in that tin shack right behind the Catholic church.”

“George and her both.”

“George … now, he wasn’t
killed
, was he? He
died
 … natural.”

Werner saw his chance to move in. “That George … he
died …
of
drinking
 … too much of that goddamn sonofabitch water from
Sabula.
”

Sabula was at least fifteen miles downstream from Bellevue. Werner cackled happily to himself. Cheered by his own joke, he set on me.

“You can always tell a goddamn Englishman. He’s always smoking a goddamn pipe. Sonofabitch.”

It was like being challenged to an Eskimo insult ritual.

“You can always tell a goddamn Umurrican,” I said. “He’s always trying to crack some damnfool joke about the Briddish. Sonofabitch.”

“He’s got you, Werner. What you got to say to that, Werner?”

“Sonofabitch,” said Werner.

Sometime overnight the level of the river had fallen. Gulls appeared to be miraculously walking on the water; then I saw that they were standing on the wing dams whose rocky tops were now just breaking the
surface. The going was rough but manageable. The bluffs gave little protection from the wind here. Since Dubuque, they had been steadily falling in height; dwindling from mountainsides down to mere tumps and hummocks. The forest was broken by farms whose broad fields came almost to the river’s edge, their earth mat black, their avenues of standing corn as high as single-story houses. I followed the buoys through a puzzle of islands, zigzagging east and west across the river, past Big and Little Soupbone Islands and into Savanna Bay. A man was fishing off the end of a gas dock under the sooty sky.

“Ain’t no gas—” he shouted as I came close.

“I was looking for a place to tie up.”

“Cost you a dollar—”

“That’s okay—”

He was live-baiting for crappies. A shoal of sick minnows swam in a pail by his side. His dock was a tumbledown venture with a one-room shack patched with driftwood and a line of gas pumps that looked as if they dated from sometime in the 1940s. He jerked his head at them.

“Three pumps. No gas in them. I wouldn’t pay the price they was asking. The price of gas now, it’s goddamn ridiculous. I wouldn’t pay that price. I’d rather close up my business than pay what they was asking for it.”

“So what do you do now?”

“Fish.”

He briefly removed his attention from his red-and-white-striped bobber and directed it at me. I watched him take in my luggage with its airline tags and my grubby but still citified clothes. His face filled with the distaste of the countryman for the urban tourist.

“We can live off the land here. ’Round here …” He sniggered, choosing his words carefully. “… we fuck dawgs.”

“Really. That’s something I’ve not tried.”

He inspected my boat. Whatever he saw in it did not please him. “You from Minnesota?”

“No—London, England.”

His face didn’t flicker. “See? I knew you wasn’t from around here.”

I lugged my bags across the tracks to the Radke Hotel and a monastic cell of a room at six dollars a night. It was the lobby of the hotel, a vintage American interior, that made me warm immediately to the place. Club rockers, leaking gouts of horsehair, were lined across the wide marble floor. The blades of an old standing fan did an inefficient job of churning up the air, a rich and smelly compound of cheap cigar smoke, dust, machine oil and fly spray. It was so thick that the black-and-white
TV set, parked high on a wall, cast a beam in which Barbara Walters floated in tangible soft focus. A fluted column ran up to a cobwebby ceiling of embossed classical plaster. There were battered spittoon-style ashtrays beside each rocker, and the varnished timber walls looked old enough to be original Tudor, oddly out of phase with the new Dr. Pepper and 7-Up machine tand the dispenser housing
P-WEE P-NUTS
10¢.

Almost every rocker held a dozing occupant with a cracked leather satchel and an orange lantern. The railroad men. The Burlington Northern met up with the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific here, and the lower end of the town petered out into a huge maze of yards and sidings, so that the railway lines far outnumbered the huddle of streets. Engineers and brakemen changed trains in Savanna; they put up at the Radke for their rest periods and colored the town with their raffish, temporary presence. They were up and about at all hours. After dark, they moved by the light of their lanterns, fireflies on Main Street; just in from Chicago, just off for Aurora, Galesburg or Des Moines, the whistles on their engines sounding like a lost patrol of mad tuba players. They were proper travelers. They kept as much of life as they needed in their leather satchels; they were careless about soap and razors; they kept themselves to themselves. In the lobby of the Radke, they growled at each other in some taciturn code of their own. I never made head nor tail of any of the conversations that I overheard, and when I timidly tried to make contact with the railroad men all I got was times and destinations.
Chicago, five after two
was as much as they were prepared to reveal of their identity; I began to try thinking of myself as
The sea, sometime
, and on the whole, it seemed a fairly satisfactory definition.

For conversation, I had to go to Canavan’s Pub across the street. Canavan kept extended railroad hours and ran his bar as a social salon. Everyone went to Canavan’s and got introduced by Canavan to more or less everyone else. It was much like going to a party given by a skilled hostess. A space was found for me in a characteristically mixed group; a retired jazz musician, a young auctioneer and real estate agent, an attorney and his wife, a factory machinist and an insurance salesman. The talk jumped from the contents of the current issue of
The New York Review of Books
to the prospects for the coming coon season. There are very few places in the United States which even remotely confirm any of the more benign myths of American life, especially that most benign and most untrue myth of American classlessness; and if Canavan’s Pub seemed to confirm it, that had more to do with the
peculiar character of its owner than with anything else. Canavan just knew how to tend a good bar. With his lumbering figure, broody eyes and squeaky voice, he looked after his customers as if they were plants in a garden; watering here, weeding out there, going at apparently stony ground with a hoe until the soil was broken and things could take root.