Old Glory (35 page)

“Hey,” said Judith. “It’s real nifty.”

The water was barely dimpled now. A few strokes of pale cirrus showed up on the clear sky. Gentle, picnic weather.

“
How
far is it to New Orleans?”

“I don’t know. Fourteen hundred. Something like that.”

“God—”

“Are you coming after all?”

“Uh-uh. I got to teach school. I always wanted to see New Orleans, though. I never thought of going there by river.”

The fields came right down to the levee and the strip of white sand on the shore. Judith was studying them.

“You know? Something I notice here—in this part of Iowa, they got dirty beans.”

“Dirty
beans?
”

“Yeah. Those fields there, they’re real dirty.” She could hardly have sounded more morally disapproving if she’d caught her charges playing with themselves in the school lavatories. “Where I come from, they’d never do that. They clean the beans. You know, one year they sow corn, the next they sow beans. Up around Orange City, they get all the corn out,
then
they plant the beans. Here … look! See how the old corn’s gotten all mixed up with the beans? That’s dirty beans.”

“Is that what they taught you at the Dutch Reformed Church?”

“No,” said Judith, squinting, serious. “It ain’t religious or anything. It’s just what the farmers do.”

“Like apartheid.”

“What?”

“Beans and corn. Whites and blacks. You’re instinctive segregationists.”

Judith laughed and trailed her fingers in the Mississippi. The sun was dropping, and I turned the boat around. Lights were beginning to come on in the mansions on the bluff. Pushing upstream against the current in the dead calm, one could feel the strength of the river, its slow, deep, thrusting resistance to the boat. Judith’s long shadow rode out ahead of us.

“You make a perfect figurehead,” I called, but the motor was too loud for her to hear. Head cupped in her hands on the bow, she was still mooning over the moral degeneracy of eastern Iowa with its dirty beans, I think.

When we reached the landing, the last of the sun had bled into the river. Because the Mississippi ran due west here, Muscatine was famous for its sunsets, and today’s was a small masterpiece of the genre. The waxed surface of the water had a glowing bloom to it. The force of the current made it bulge like a muscle. The color of it started as black under our feet, lightening to blue, then rose madder, then scarlet and yellow as it reached the horizon. In silhouette, the giant drums of GPC had turned to the towers of a Gothic castle afloat on their reflections.

For Judith, though, the sunset was an old Muscatine cliché. Look, I said, look; and babbled about colors and castles. “Yeah,” she said, wrinkling her nose uninterestedly westward. “It’s real pretty. What am I supposed to do with this rope? You want me to put some kind of a knot in it, or something?”

In the hotel bar, we sat up alongside Ed, the oldest of the permanent residents. He was eighty, and had landed up in Muscatine years before from Idaho. He had a rock of gray limestone for a face, with a single tuft of white hair like a sprig of marram grass. He was interested in my journey, for he had travel plans of his own. The evening before, I had shown him my route on the river charts. Tonight, he had an old railway timetable to show me.

“I worked it all out,” he said. “I got all the connections.”

The timetable was for 1956. The trains it showed were nearly all dead.

“Round early in November, I’ll be going there. Hey, Judith—I tell you where I’m going this fall?”

“Yeah, Ed. You’re going down to the Rio Grande.”

“That’s right. Gonna spend all winter down in the valley of the Rio Grande. Know a girl there. Little town … Eagle Pass, Texas, right up from Laredo. Goddamn.” He sucked reminiscently at his beer glass. “She wrote me this letter. I had to send word to my mother, back in Idaho, and this girl, she wrote it out for me real nice. She wrote beautiful. Just like a schoolteacher.” He looked crookedly across at me, then at Judith. “I had a kind of busted hand, then. That’s why I couldn’t do the writing on my own. Busted it on the railroad. Then I was someplace else, and, I dunno, we got all out of goddamn touch. Shit. But I’m going to get down to Eagle Pass, later in the fall, and I’m going to see that girl … if she ain’t dead yet.”

“When were you there last?”

“Nineteen and … Hell, must’ve been eighteen … nineteen. Can’t remember.”

Later, over dinner, Judith said, “That Ed, God, he’s such a dreamer. Ever since I’ve been in Muscatine he’s been saying that crazy stuff about the Rio Grande. Every fall he talks about going down there. He ain’t never going to get south of Hershey Avenue.”

I envied Ed the unreality of his trip. It would have been nice to stay on in Muscatine, merely dreaming of the river. But it couldn’t be. The weather systems that were arbitrarily circling around America were being unkind. Judith and I had watched the local news and forecast on the bar TV. The weatherman pointed his baton at tomorrow’s wind speed: 0-5 mph. I was going to have to join the butterflies and the Canada geese again, and move on south.

The weatherman had been right: there was no wind at all. He hadn’t mentioned precipitation, though, and for once the American word for rain seemed an exact description of what was happening. This rain didn’t just fall; it precipitated. It descended, gravitated, condensed, deposited and settled. Fine and close, it turned the air to wet smoke. It made the branches of the trees sag under its dull weight. It came in droplets so small that they left no mark on the water. In minutes, I was as thoroughly saturated as if I had been swimming in my clothes. Everything had gone to the color of gray ash: river, trees, sand, fields. There was no sky—or if there was, I was driving soddenly through it. A hundred yards away, the leading barge of a tow showed as a blunt smear, apparently suspended overhead in midair. I ran out of the channel and decided to keep to the wrong side of the red buoys for as long as the rain lasted. When the tow’s wake arrived, it came in a series of big, lethargic slurps from the clouds, as if the river had tipped up on its end and were pointing into space. It wouldn’t have made much difference if the wake had capsized me: the relative density of the water must have been almost identical to the relative density of the air. The candy-striped canopy over the boat was no help; the wetness precipitated just as wetly underneath it as above it. I tried to light a pipe to cheer myself up, but the tobacco was squidgy, like steaming manure.
Christ that my love were in my arms, and I in my bed again
. The motor growled at my back, stirring the dead river. Then the sky lifted.

It sat now on the treetops instead of on the water, making a wide, low-ceilinged corridor of the river. Shaking myself like a dog, I passed New Boston. The dripping cement works there didn’t look inviting. Nor did Keithsburg. The Mississippi fanned out through a dank, wide-open reach of flatland, marsh and forest. I killed the motor, changed
gas tanks, and let the boat raft slowly down on the current, turning broadside as it went. In the stillness I could hear scuffles in the brushwood on the bank and the sibilant trickle of water over the sand.

On the Illinois side there was a dead tree which seemed to function as a skid-row hotel for a gang of large, ne’er-do-well birds. As I came close, they lumbered off from their posts, assembled above the treetops in a ragged battle formation, and came out over the river to see whether this floating yellow thing was meat. When I started my motor, I thought the birds would scatter in fright, but they kept on coming, in lower and lower circles, until they were perhaps twenty or thirty feet over my head. Their wings creaked. They made bronchial
kark-kark
noises in their throats. They looked scarred, moth-eaten and hungry, and reminded me unpleasantly of the Buffalo chapter of Hell’s Angels.
Karrack. Karrack. Shit. Sonofabitch
. I dug my dark glasses out of my grip, possessed by the thought that the first thing they’d try to peck out would be my eyes.

I hadn’t yet found an occasion to use the aerosol froghorn that was stowed away beside the fire extinguisher. I pointed it at the birds and put my thumb down on the lever; it made a hideous noise like a bass saxophone stuck on a flat note. It didn’t seem to scare the birds much, but they did climb disdainfully a few feet higher in the air. For a long half mile they kept pace with me, croaking nastily as I blasted at them with the froghorn; then, abruptly, they wheeled back to their dead tree.

In my run-in with the birds I hadn’t noticed that something very odd was happening to the sky. It was splitting in two. The cloud had ripped away down a clean diagonal line from horizon to horizon. One side of the line was clear blue; the other was a bank of solid gray. I began to take pictures of this curious meteorological event. Bringing it into focus in the viewfinder, I remembered what the lockmaster had told me in Minneapolis. “Watch that sky. You ever see anything queer about it, if the clouds look wrong somehow, get off the river.” The nearest town was Oquawka, Illinois, three miles downstream, and I kept as close as I could to the shore as I ran for shelter there. The wind came up from nowhere. The glazed surface of the river puckered, and by the time I reached harbor, a quarter of an hour later, the boat was wallowing in heavy breakers. I beached it alongside the jonboat of a camouflaged duck hunter. He’d seen the crack in the sky too, and had come in from his hide on the stump field across the channel.

“I was watching you, wondering if you’d make it,” he said. “Wind’s getting up real fast now.”

The waves were bunching more steeply by the minute. They were rolling up out of the blue southwest across a four-mile stretch of open water. We stood on the levee watching them suck and slap at the shore. I told the duck hunter about the birds.

“Oh, them red-headed vultures back there? Yeah, they’re weird. They been hanging around that one tree for as long as I can remember. They spook people. You have to shake an oar at them or they’ll come right down in the boat with you. You know the weirdest thing? They never cross the state line. They’ll fly out to mid-channel, and the moment they touch Iowa, they’ll turn back. Even if there was a dead muskrat floating by on the Iowa side, I reckon they’d leave it be.”

The wind blew steadily on through the afternoon. Sitting in a bar on Schuyler Street, I watched the swinging Texaco sign of the garage opposite and waited for it to quieten. Four o’clock went by. Judith would be out of school now. I damned the weather forecaster who had stranded me in Oquawka. The Texaco sign was blown out straight; it came back, and another gust shook it like a rag of washing on a line. At five, with just an hour to go before sunset, the sign settled to a gentle rocking, and I went back to the boat. The river was still streaky with whitecaps, but the breakers were flaccid, slopping listlessly about in the hangover of the storm. The going was splashy, but reasonably safe, and I kept the boat tacking at half speed down the channel. By the time I reached Lock 17, six miles on, the pool above the dam had returned to a black, syrupy calm.

The first set of barges from a big double tow was being nudged into the lock at the downstream end. It would be dark before I would be able to go through. I wondered if I should leave the boat where it was till morning, and went to ask the lockmaster’s advice.

“You got navigation lights on there? You won’t have no problem. There’s nothing much coming up that I know of. Just keep to this side of those islands down there, keep right on through Drew Chute, you ought to be in Burlington in the half hour. I don’t see what your problem is.”

“I’ve just never driven the boat at night before.”

“Oh, you’ll see pretty well. Ain’t nothing to it, when your eyes get accustomed.”

The tow took an age to be disassembled and put back together. Deckhands with flashlights and Arkansas voices skipped from barge to barge, hauling on ropes that were thicker than their forearms. When I was signaled into the chamber, the moon was up, silvering the slime on the lock wall. I was lowered into the black. The sluices rumbled
in their underground tunnels. When the gates opened, they framed a puzzling abstract of mat India ink spotted with scraps of tinsel.

My eyes weren’t accustomed. I nosed out gingerly, feeling my way through water that I couldn’t see. The lights on my boat were supposed to make it visible to other people and were no help in making the river visible to me. I went ahead, giving the motor little, nervous dribbles of gas. A flat-topped black buoy, heeling over in the current, went by so close I could have leaned out and touched it. I could just make out the irregular hump of Otter Island and steered to the left of it. For a few minutes I congratulated myself on beginning, at least, to get the hang of this business of night navigation. Then I saw the pointed top of another buoy five yards ahead of my bow. A red. I hadn’t been going downstream at all; I’d just crossed the channel at right angles.

The carbide searchlight of a tow (was it across or down from where I was?) raked the river. I headed for what I hoped was the shore, and the tow disappeared over my head at terrifying speed. It left no wake behind, and it was only when I saw another, racing by at the same altitude, that I realized that the tows were trucks on a highway. I edged on. Another beam swiveling idly on the water suddenly picked out my boat and held me, half blinded. The long, growling blast of the siren was as queerly, then scarily, intimate as the cough of a stranger in one’s bedroom. Panicking, I swung the head of the boat and drove it at full tilt. Any direction would do—just not, please not, into the tow. It went past, thirty yards off, a lone towboat without its barges. Its balconied side and back were lit up like a Christmas tree, but from the front it had been as black as the surrounding river. Its high wake caught me broadside; I had miscalculated the direction it would come from; and as I hung in the trough, the boat rolled and the left-hand gunwale began to gouge cleanly into the side of the wave. I was shin deep in water before I could swing the front of the boat around and ride out the swell.