Old Glory (29 page)

A big owl came out of a tree over our heads, making a noise like a tumbling cardboard box. Following the roundel of light cast on the uneven ground by Bob’s flashlight, we moved off in single file down a gully and into a cornfield. The crickets kept up a constant electrical throbbing. The hounds crashed and scuffled ahead of us. Talking in whispers, we tiptoed through the high-arched corridors of standing
corn. “He’s sniffing pretty good now—he’s smelled something there.” “No, he hain’t. He’s just fooling. Ketchup!”

“Be quiet and let ’em hunt, now—” Bob was colonel of the expedition. Bill, Ron and I needed to be kept under almost as strict control as the dogs.

We covered a mile or so of broken country. The corn gave way to a tangle of brush, a grazing pasture, a deep wood. Thunder was quartering the ground methodically, making gurgling noises in his throat. Ketchup was mostly content to chase his own tail, bark at owls and find happy patches of wet mud to roll in. Then Thunder “opened”; raising his voice to a sobbing contralto, he went plunging in a straight line up a long timbered hill. We ran behind him, the points of the flashlight dancing in the trees. “He’s onto a coon now. Go get him, Thunder—” But the scent stopped at a creek. Thunder stood on the edge of the water, turning in baffled circles and moaning to himself.

“Where is he, Thunder?”

The dog sniffed along the bank, opened for a moment and lost the trail again.

“A coon,” Bob said, “… he just loves to go along a crick like this one here, chasing frogs and crawdads and such.” He made the coon’s own hunting trips sound like innocent and curiously skittish affairs, as if the frogs and crawdads were toys rather than prey. We waded through the creek. Thunder picked up the scent once more on the far side. His strangulated singing sounded like a tone-deaf opera fan trying to do
Aïda
in the shower. We stumbled after him through the tall grass and sodden earth, and caught up with him at the bottom of a great red oak, where he stood on his hind legs, howling and scratching at the bark.

“Yeah. He’s treed him. Good dog, Thunder, good dog.” Ketchup was standing by, barking at the tree, barking at Thunder, barking at us, stupid with delight at the way life was panning out for him.

“Now we got to find him.”

We stood in line on a crumbly ridge, raking the black foliage with our flashlights, turning the leaves to silver while the dogs caroled around the bole. Somewhere in that tasseled darkness, sixty feet up, I saw a twin amber flash. The coon had blinked.

“Look—” I said.

Bob followed my beam. Another, longer glow of bloody orange. The coon was staring back at us.

“Now, if we was hunting for real, you’d have to hold your light in your left hand … like that … and shoot with your right.”

The coon was gazing straight into my own eyes, appalled. I wished that there’d been some way of reassuring it that it was currently out of season and that it had another few weeks at least of chasing frogs and crawdads down creeks.

The dogs were called off. We searched another cornfield, climbed a new hill. Across the narrow valley, a strange dog was baying from a farm.

“Sounds like that’s a German shepherd out there.”

“I hope they got it chained good.”

On a tangled brushwood knoll, Ketchup let out a series of hysterical yelps. When we got to him, he was digging himself furiously into the middle of a sandbank. The men stood over him with their lamps. “Go get him, Ketchup,” said Ron, almost as pleased as the dog at this unexpected vindication of Ketchup’s talents as a coon hunter. “That’s a coon, all right. He’s right deep in there. Go on, Ketchup, get him, go on!” All this encouragement was a shade unnecessary; the dog’s hindquarters were flailing and shuddering with joy as he tunneled deeper in. With his mouth full of earth, his articulation was a good deal impeded, but he was giving out a delirious
hoi-hoi-hoi-hoi-hoi-hoi
sound, his hind legs cycling crazily in the air.

“Hey!” shouted Bob. “Get him
outa
there! Goddamn
skunk!
Get him
out!
”

Ketchup was hauled, howling, from his ecstatic burrow by all four of us. As he emerged, so did something else: a sickly gust, half charcoal, half rotten eggs, with a zest of ammonia, and very strong. He was put on a leash and taken up to the waiting cars in disgrace. It wasn’t Ketchup’s night. The skunk’s fetor filled the little wood. Days later, I could still catch a faint whiff of it in my clothes. We stood out under the stars, stinking of skunk. Bob got a six-pack from the trunk of his station wagon. The metallic taste of the cold beer seemed to have become queerly mixed up with skunk too. It was four fifteen in the morning. The bright points of the constellation of Orion lay very low indeed in the sky.

I had meant to sleep in, to spend at least one more day in Savanna, but when I woke at nine there wasn’t a leaf moving in the maple tree outside my window. It was too good a traveling day to lose. I had seen from the charts that there was a huge pool above the lock and dam at Clinton, just a little way downstream. I was scared of facing it in any measurable wind at all; it was a lake seven miles long and four wide, without a single marked island to give cover and the channel running
clean through its middle. I packed my bags in a hurry, keeping one eye on the leaves to make sure that they weren’t beginning to stir.

The river was safely dead in the sun. Every flourish and excursion of the current was marked as a neat crease on its top. I was sad to leave Savanna; even the old satirist at the gas dock was unpredictably friendly.

“I hear you was out last night treeing coon. How many you get?”

“Just one, and a skunk. I thought you’d have smelled it on me.”

He laughed. “Yeah. Maybe I did.”

Perhaps, at last, I’d lost my urban taint. I slid past Sabula on the current, dodged the wakes of a couple of upstream tows, rounded a long string of green islands, and entered the pool above Clinton. The chart called it just “Big Slough.” This seemed a strange falling-down on the creative job of naming sloughs. Either they were christened after people or they had memorable names which expressed their shape, or what lay in them, or what grew on their islands: Snag, Hubble, Soup-bone, Hickory, Crooked, Dead Man’s … No one, apparently, had found anything to say about Big Slough except that it was big, and its bigness had rendered every other feature irrelevant.

On this windless morning, the water of Big Slough looked as viscous as thick machine oil. It was blackened by the decomposing forest that lay under it. Miles of it were so shallow that the stump fields on either side of the channel were exposed right down to their spreading roots. Wedded to their own immobile reflections, the stumps, in their hundreds of thousands, made arabesque patterns of flattened hexagons. Away across the slough there was the rigid outline of a man in a punt, fishing for his image, and the image casting back. Not a sound, not a ripple fractured the great, empty symmetry of the place. With the motor killed, I was part of it: doubled in water, I was as lifeless a component of the scheme as a carboniferous stump.

If only one could make the notion of freedom into a tangible object, I thought, it would look like Big Slough—a huge, curved, reflective vacancy. No sea could quite attain this greasy calm, or communicate the essential place of dead things, rottenness, torpidity in the vision. Big Slough could.

In my old, city life there hadn’t been a day when I didn’t sweat at the sheer fiddle of the thing: the telephone ringing, or failing to ring; the bills in manila envelopes; the rows, the makings-up; the jumpy claustrophobia of just surviving as one small valve in the elaborate and hazardous circuit of ordinary society.
If only … if only
 … and at the end of the sentence there was always somewhere the word
free
, a
careless stand-in for a careless notion of benign emptiness. But Big Slough really looked free, and for all its peat-brown beauty, it made me shudder. Floating on it felt like being dead, and I reckoned that there was a lesson to be learned from that sensation.

Freedom, though, would never be so conveniently marked with such a regular, winding trail of buoys. Red and black, red and black, their roulette colors led out past the stumps, away from the enormous weir and into the chamber of Lock 13. For the first time in my trip, I saw a Mississippi lock as a safe, contained place; it felt just the right size, and it was good to be inching down the wall with Big Slough behind me.

It took a long sultry afternoon to reach the outskirts of the Quad Cities, with the sun steadily weakening until water and sky faded to the same uncolor. I tied my boat up at a marina in Moline and made a brief acquaintance with the good-time set in the club bar. It was oppressively male, and I wanted to escape from the company of these aging jocks with their acrimonious divorces, their giant powerboats and their glowering paranoia.

A meaty fifty-year-old in a Hawaiian shirt was saying, “When that black … when that black puts a rock through my picture window, I’m ready for him. I got a loaded gun right by the TV, and that black, he’s going to get shot.”

I asked him if he was talking about some particular black who had been threatening his property. He wasn’t. He was just talking about blacks, all blacks, in general. There were sixteen whites to every black in Moline.

“So what happens if a white man puts the rock through your window?”

He paused and stared at me, his eyes foggy with booze. What a goddamn ridiculous question.

“I guess he’d get shot too,” he said, but it was clear that his words didn’t carry much conviction, even in his own head.

A younger man offered me a room in his apartment. “You could get laid.” I tried to imagine myself as an egg in the womb of an Amazonian hen, and politely declined. He put his arm around my shoulder. “You like to smoke? I got some Acapulco Gold. Lay on a coupla broads … we could party.… What you like to drink? British Scotch? I got a whole case in my cocktail cabinet. Hey, you seen my road racer out there?” It was parked outside the bar window: a swollen phallus painted in acrylic stripes of white and purple. It had a phosphorescent
bumper sticker announcing
IT’S GREAT TO BE SINGLE
.

“There’s fourteen thousand bucks in that car.”

“I bet there is.” I could see him speeding around the city, his money his only companion. A dog, I thought, would have been better for his character.

“Hell, come on, we can have a great time.”

His loneliness shone through his boastful face.
Go with the current of things
. I flipped a coin in my head but, to my relief, it came down tails.

I settled into an old, pleasantly frowsty hotel in Davenport. The Quad Cities were a queer agglomeration. Their suburbs had leaked and dribbled into each other, and finally the whole mess had loosely congealed. Rock Island and Moline, on the east bank of the river, were in Illinois; Davenport and Bettendorf were in Iowa. They hadn’t come together to make a metropolis, but they had lost their identities as individual towns. For twelve miles, they straggled lumpishly along the wharves, the hard angles of their warehouses, steel tanks and factories hemming in the river. Everything was too low, too spread out, to make much more than a cheeky gesture of encroachment on the Mississippi, like a line of children’s sand castles on a seashore.

I ate at the Dock, where they had a fine line in restaurant-English. I could never get used to this strange dialect which so awkwardly combined the ceremonial and the intimate. The captain-waiter met me at the door, a lugubrious figure in black.

“And is there just one in your party this evening, sir?”

I admitted, a little shamefacedly, that there was only me; and I didn’t feel at all like a party.

The captain-waiter passed me into the hands of an usher in tights and froufrou.

“Hi, my name is Julie! And I will show you to your table! Your waiter for this evening is Doug, and he’ll be just right along. See you later!”

Doug announced himself. “Hi, my name is Doug and I am your waiter for this evening. I hope you enjoy your meal.”

It was like dropping into the middle of a puppet show. Where had they learned this extraordinary style of speech? It must have been dreamed up in order to give waiting at table the impersonal professional status of gynecology or the law, yet it succeeded in doing precisely the reverse. It made me feel like a customer at a brothel, all this false solicitude for my physical needs.

“What kind of dressing would you like on your salad, sir, this evening?” I found something faintly menacing in the constant repetition of the phrase “this evening,” as if I had been condemned to dine at the Dock every night of my life. I had barely started to poke at the lettuce when Julie sprang on me with a smile that looked as if it had been purchased at a shop selling rubber masks.

“And are you having a good evening this evening, sir?”

“I’m having an … ab … so … lutely … a … 
dor
 … able evening,” I said, my mouth full of soggy tomato. At least I had managed to disconcert her. “Oh,” she said, “well that’s neat,” and fled.

Below my window seat the river lay like a rumpled sheet of shiny black vinyl. Tows were moving, their carbide searchlights raking its surface and turning the railroad bridge to a filigree silhouette. The fort on Arsenal Island was a child’s cardboard toy. Beside the river, everything dwindled. It was, I thought, appropriate that the talk in the restaurant should sound so tinny and artificial. There was a pre-emptive reality about that great, intricate drift of dark water, spooling and crumpling as it went, which reduced the captain-waiter and Julie and Doug and me and the Rock Island Railroad and the stone castle of the Corps of Engineers to the status of ham actors and painted theatrical flats. No wonder that the rivermen I’d met talked with a good deal of condescension about “people on the beach.” It was an attitude that I was rapidly developing myself. I felt that I had a secret stake in the Mississippi and that it ought to show on my face as a visible mark of aristocracy.

On my way out, Julie said, or rather sang, “Come back and see us soon, sir!” and the funereal captain-waiter said, “Have a good night, now,” and I walked around the side of the restaurant and crouched on the wharf, feeling impertinently possessive about my river.