Old Glory (48 page)

He pointed shakily at my glass. “What’s in there, feller? What you drinking?”

“No, thanks. I’m fine. Really.”

“I
asked
you. What you drinking?”

“Scotch and water. No ice.”

“
Okay. Baw
-tendah!”

He wobbled, and clung to the brass rail.

“Now. Our forefathers … our forefathers … they … our forefathers, they … kinda … 
made
this country …” But he couldn’t go on, and cried instead. In the washed-out color of the bar TV, a newscaster announced that the trade deficit amassed by the United States in the last month was 2 billion 830 million dollars. It seemed like a fact to hang on to, more solid than the rail of the bar. Beside me, the old man with the artificial larynx mopped himself up apologetically with a Kleenex.

The northwesterly wind had raised a swell on the water, and I kept as close as I could to the Missouri bank, hugging the dikes and running ashore every time I saw an upstream tow. Below Sainte Genevieve, the river made a sharp leftward swing into a chute. Halfway down it, I looked back and saw I was on a steep hill of traveling water—a three-mile slide, on which the horizon behind me was way above the horizon in front. A tow was coming over the top of the hill, and I could see it tip as it entered the chute. No wonder the river had seemed suddenly calm; it was streaming past the sandbars like a glacier. A mile ahead,
another tow was coming up round Kaskaskia Bend. I ran for the shore. The motor stalled as it hit sand a hundred yards out, and I clambered to the front of the boat to get my anchor down before I drifted, broadside, into a dike. Everything seemed to be moving in a different direction. The low sandbars were going away to the west; I was trying to follow them by heading south; the river was flowing east. I couldn’t work out what was in motion and what was fixed. If I was moving, then the sandbars weren’t; if the sandbars were moving … It was like being unpleasantly high on marijuana: a giddy, topsy-turvy world of shifting quantities.
My mind’s not right
.

The boat swung and steadied on the anchor line. At least, the stone dike didn’t seem to be getting any closer. I studied the chart, and the world went even queerer; there was no doubt about it, this wasn’t the Missouri, it was the Illinois shore. Or rather, there were now two Illinois shores. I am not a morning drinker, but I took a long slug of bourbon from the bottle before I made a closer, alarmed study of the charts.

It took a while, but the puzzle did eventually come out. The hill of water was a “cutoff.” In the nineteenth century, the Mississippi made a wide meander to the right, enclosing a projecting knob of the state of Illinois. The Kaskaskia River had entered the Mississippi at the apex of the loop, and the town of Kaskaskia, the first French settlement in Illinois and an important steamboat town, sat at the junction of the two rivers. Then the Mississippi broke through down the hill, marooning fifteen square miles of Illinois inside Missouri and leaving Kaskaskia high and dry. My chart showed it as a pathetic little grid, five blocks by three, too small to merit even a mention in the index of the Rand McNally. The river had just chucked it aside, as carelessly as if it were a Dr. Pepper can.

With the channel clear of tows, I eased myself out into midstream and took the rest of the chute, shaving the right-hand shore to clear the enormous eddy that swirled where the river piled into the sandstone bluff on the bend. I didn’t dare take my eyes off the water. Somewhere on the periphery of my vision I caught splintered images of red, ribbed rock and bare trees rooted to the crags like resting mountaineers. But there was a boil to swerve aside from, a puff of smoke from a tow beyond Chester Highway Bridge, tongues of dirty sand posted
SOUTHERN ILLINOIS STATE PENITENTIARY
, an odd black crack in the current; enough material to make a good landscape for a bad dream.

At Chester, Illinois, I ran ashore on solid rock. Dizzied by the river, I needed to come awake. A young man was slouching, hands in pockets, at the edge of the water. Every town on this reach of the Mississippi had
its own young man—a doleful riverfront figure with the air of the village idiot. Their faces were twisted into a permanent scowl from staring into the current. They wore cracked snake boots, faded jeans, windbreakers and forage caps. Some carried guns and pretended to be out hunting. Most, though, just gazed emptily at the water as if it were a nonstop television channel.

Chester’s version said: “You want me to watch your boat for you, mister? Don’t trust them Chester people. They’ll steal
anythin’.
”

He had come with his mother from South Carolina. For three years he had worked as a professional fisherman, netting cats and buffalo. Fear had got him in the end: he couldn’t swim; his mother had begged him to come off the river; he had watched two of his friends drown. Now he worked, miserably and part time, as a taxi dispatcher.

“You could’ve worn a life vest.”

“Don’t make no difference, I reckon. I seen people in life vests drown just like other folks.”

“But you still miss the river.”

“All the time. Every minute.” He was looking past my shoulder, reading the squiggles on the water.

There was a rough wooden stairway leading up the bluff. It had been pulled away in places by green creepers: a breakneck affair of missing steps and bulging handrails. At a bar at the top I bought two hamburgers for myself and a six-pack for the young man. We took a can each.

“You got a good rig here,” he said sadly. “That’s something I always wanted to do: go down the river. Where’d you put in at?”

“Minneapolis.”

“That up in Canada?”

“No. Minnesota.”

“I thought the Mississippi went all up to Canada.”

“Not quite. It starts at Lake Itasca. That’s about ninety miles short of the border with Ontario. You can jump over it there. It doesn’t really get navigable until Minneapolis. That’s nearly two hundred miles south.”

“Shit,” he said. “And you come all the ways down in this?” He was making a slow, envious inventory of the boat. “There ain’t just about anything I wouldn’t give, to get away from them people in Chester.”
Chay-ester
, he said.

I watched him as I left: another crippled snow goose.

The river was peeling away from under me now. Hurried along by the current, I was making nearly twenty miles in an hour and getting distinctly cocky about boils, eddies and chutes. I allowed myself some
furtive enjoyment of the country I was passing through: the water moving like syrup around boulders as big as houses, cliffs streaked red and gray, the wiry forest and the sand which seemed to move like the water itself, in ripples and spools. I found a homemade tune which, with a bit of fiddling around the edges, could be fitted to the words of Gavin Ewart’s poem, and I bawled it out over the river.

By the time I got to Grand Tower, I was in a state of fizzy nervous elation. Grand Tower itself was a pillar of rock which stuck out of the river like a wrinkled limb; twenty stories high, with a fringe of trees on top. The water divided around it in a greasy collar, swelling up at its base and making the deepest whirlpool I’d yet seen between the rock and the Missouri shore. I wanted the town of Grand Tower, though, and rowed myself over the shallows to a sandy beach as big as a seashore on the Illinois side. The town was a low white village, completely hidden behind a levee. I walked to the café with my thermos flask. I needed a refill of coffee to get on to Cape Girardeau.

Hearing my accent, a man came across to the counter and joined me. He was a construction engineer from Chicago, on a temporary job in the wilderness. He had a boat himself, a big cruiser, and he’d fallen in love with the river. He interrogated me about my own trip. What size was my boat? How big was my engine? What spares did I carry? At every answer I gave, he shook his head.

“You moored up on the beach? I’ll run you over there. I want to take a look at this.”

We climbed the levee. I pointed down to where my boat was pulled up on the sand.

“
That?
You’ve got to be
shitting
me.”

“It … looks bigger when you get closer. A bit.”

“You’ve got to be joking.”

We waded through the powdery beach.

“So where’s your radio?”

“I haven’t got one.”

“Jesus Christ. You think you can ride this river in a boat like that without a
radio?
”

“Well, I’ve made it so far.”

“What—fingering your St. Christopher all the way, huh? Listen to
me. I’m serious. If you want to stay alive, you’ve got to get yourself a radio. Marine Band. Three channels. How the hell are you going to know what the tows are doing in the chutes if you can’t talk to them?”

“I pull in to the shore when I see them coming.”

“You don’t travel at night, do you?”

“No.”

“Well, thank God for small mercies. Look, I don’t like to lose my sleep; and I’m not going to sleep too good if I have to lie around thinking about you going down the river like
this
. You get to Cape Girardeau, you’ve got to find some guy to sell you a radio. It’s going to set you back three, maybe four hundred bucks. You got that kind of money?”

“Yes, I’m loaded.”

“You’re not shitting me? Because I’m leveling with you, now. Can you afford a radio?”

“Yes. I’ve got a checking account in a New York bank.”

“Well, now, you’re going to have to make me a promise. You’re not going to leave Cape Girardeau without a radio.”

“I promise.”

“And I
mean
that.”

“I do too. In Cape Girardeau I’ll buy a radio.”

He helped me push the boat back into the water. “You’re not lying to me, now?”

“No. And thanks.”

He was right. It had been foolish of me to try to manage the open river without a radio. I couldn’t talk to the pilots of the tows; I had no means of calling for help. The gaps between towns were growing wider: soon there would be a hundred miles of empty forest and water between one hamlet and the next.

I was chastened by the fact that a complete stranger had been so alarmed for my safety that he’d offered to lend or give me as much money as he probably earned in a week, particularly since he’d made it quite clear that he had precious little respect for my character or intelligence.

Just below Grand Tower there was another cutoff where a rapid chute had handed a chunk of Missouri back to Illinois. Entering it at an alarming speed, I couldn’t see its far end and could only cross my fingers in the hope that there wasn’t a big tow pushing upstream out of sight around the bend. Luckily, the chute was empty. If I’d had a radio, I would have known that I was safe or would have been warned to stay clear until the tow came through.

There was an oozing rash of boils and eddies in the water ahead as
the Mississippi made a sudden westward hook and Cape Girardeau slid out from behind a bluff. The sun had already disappeared over the top of the hills, leaving the lower sky streaked with orange, mauve and scarlet. High up in the black woods some clever pastrycook had made a whole university of royal icing. It was in the best and crackiest tradition of Mississippi-Attic, with its own Parthenon and lots of odeons and shrines. It must have taken years of work with the palette knife and the pastry tube. Frosted, fluted, scrolled, it caught the last of the sun, and its glacé finish turned to a pale pink. From a mile off, the only details I couldn’t see were the satin ribbons, silver bells and little horseshoes.

If the woody top of town was ancient Greek, its bottom was English medieval. Cape Girardeau was a walled and gated city. A gray concrete battlement, twenty feet high, had been raised around it to protect it from the river. A patchwork of shingled roofs and glass towers showed over the floodwall, but as far as I could see the place was impregnable. Its wall announced that it considered the Mississippi a dangerous enemy. The brute ugliness of the thing had fear and dislike written all over it. Here was a town that was having as little to do with its river as it could possibly manage.

I tied up at a floating jetty a few hundred yards short of the wall, where a black fisherman sat with a pail of silver live bait beside him. The jetty lurched and creaked in the current. Yeah, said the fisherman, there was hotels in Cape—real good ones, too—but they was a ways out on the Interstate.

Across the tracks, on Big Bend Road, there was a friendly filling station where the attendants let me use their telephone. If I was going to stay in a hotel on the Interstate and go scurrying after a Marine Band radio, I needed a rented car. A black Pontiac was delivered to me on the levee within fifteen minutes. The car was fine. I was less sure about the salesman who accompanied it. In a wide-wale seersucker suit and round horn-rims, he smelled of hair oil and underarm deodorant. He wasn’t just renting me the Pontiac, he was selling Cape Girardeau as a fancy piece of real estate.

He was a talking brochure. Showing rather too much bridgework, he rattled through his spiel of worn and shiny words.
Facilities. Resources. Assets. Services. Active. Strong. Expanding. Recreational Activities
.

“Just so happens, I’m a city official myself,” he said.

“Gosh, are you really?”

“Yeah. In Cape Girardeau here, we’ve got a town we’re real proud of. And I ain’t just saying that.” He nodded at the fisherman on the
jetty. “Take
race,
” he said, pronouncing the word with the same inflection that other people used for
shit
. “We get along just fine with the color in the town. We’ve only got twenty percent color, and them and us, we get on fine. No problem. They don’t make no problems for us at
all.
”

The fisherman was intent on his striped bobber as it swung and circled in the current.

“You been up to St. Louis?” the city commissioner asked. “The color they’ve got there … Trash. Same thing over in Cairo. Boy, have
they
got problems.” He looked down on the fisherman with an approving smile which might have been more properly bestowed on a housetrained family pet.