Old Glory (51 page)

The triple blast of a tow’s horn violated my inner ear, and the picture frosted over like a shattered windshield. I scraped by between the rocks and the high black wedge of the leading barges, hit the wake, wallowed, slopped, and found myself spinning on the edge of one of the balls of turbulence left by the screws. Someone on the towboat’s deck was telling me something, but I caught only his final word, which was
sonofabitch
.

I wanted to call up the
Morning Star
, but didn’t dare to for fear of being intercepted by the pilot of the tow, whose advice to me would, I knew, be sound, reasonable and too humiliating to bear listening to. Shamed by my silliness, I inched down the chart, paring to the extreme edge of the channel. That was the third time I had grown careless and cocksure with the river; I doubted very much if the Mississippi was going to allow me any more such chances.

You may draw the line across the middle distance with a ruler. It should slant just slightly up from left to right. Above it, color in a pale wash of pink and turquoise. Below it, paint the Mississippi in a rich dark tan. At the very top, cross-hatch the Kentucky bluffs; use a fine pen and India ink. On the right-hand shore, make sandy marshes, reed pools, flights of waterfowl. There should be no clouds in the sky, and you must stop the wind. Follow the instructions carefully. If you try to circumvent them by taking a camera to the foot of the highway bridge at Cairo, you will—as I did—come home with a banal pictorial lie.

The junction of the Mississippi and the Ohio was a confluence of thick machine oil and rosewater. The two looked so different that it was hard to believe they could fuse into a single element without curdling. The Mississippi held the foreground and the Missouri shore; the Ohio had Kentucky. The clean pencil stroke between the brown and the pink, running due west to east for more than two miles, must have been the one place in the United States where the cleavage of the Mason-Dixon Line had its exact counterpart in nature.

Moored below the bridge with a stale submarine sandwich, I could see the line, and the colors on either side of it, as distinctly as I could see towboats and trees. Trying to follow it in the boat, I lost it. It was true that the water was thicker and browner to my right, thinner and
clearer to my left; but it was just water. Mississippi mud was swilling in Ohio eddies, and as the stronger river took hold below Wickliffe and Fort Jefferson, one could feel it instructing the other in the art of being a wicked and dangerous character. It taught the Ohio how to make boils and whirlpools, how to loiter around sandbars and carry off chunks of forest. It had scrapped with the Missouri when they met; it married the Ohio, and it took on the added self-importance of the newlywed groom. There were long, wakelike waves off some of the bars now. They couldn’t have been caused by tows, since the river was empty as far as I could see. The Mississippi was just making waves for the hell of it; give it the temptation of a shoal and it would run in dark, serrated combers, three and four feet high, showing off its muscles.

There was something I didn’t care for in the look of the landscape. The bluffs on the Kentucky side peeled away, leaving the river surrounded by miles of its old alluvial courses—a bleak flatland of bog, black earth, oak and willow. No docks, no landings, no villages behind the levees; just a lot of sand, a lot of mud, a lot of trees. This was the bit of river that nineteenth-century English writers used to find so scarifying. Most of them had come down the Ohio, and their first sight of the Mississippi tended to shock them. Dickens was appalled by it. Captain Marryat called it a “desolating torrent.” Their versions of the Mississippi were—as Mark Twain pointed out long ago in
Life on the Mississippi—
annoyingly monochrome. They were ritually overwhelmed by its awfulness, and left it at that. Riding on it here, where the gloomy color of the earth seemed to have worked its way into the water and the sky, I found their depression easy to understand.

A jonboat came scudding out across the channel from the Kentucky shore. I tacked sharp left to avoid it, but it swerved to intercept me. There were two men aboard; one at the bow and one at the helm. Both had guns laid across their knees. Their boat came up to within twenty feet of mine. I shifted to neutral gear and floated on the current. I had no chance of outrunning them; their 30-horsepower motor could take them at more than twice my speed.

“Yes?” I said. “Hello—What do you want?”

Both wore plaid duck hunter’s caps with earmuffs buttoned up around their crowns. They must have been in their twenties, but they had squashed faces with premature deep creases around their eyes and jowls; brothers certainly, perhaps twins.

“Yes?”

No answer. I watched their eyes travel slowly over my boat and its contents. Last of all, they came to rest on my face: dim, indifferent eyes
of the kind that a taxidermist might keep in labeled boxes.

The man in the stern gave a slight shrug—half at me, half at his brother. Without explanation he accelerated away toward the shore, leaving me bobbing lightly in his wake. Were they river muggers? game wardens? Why wouldn’t they speak? They seemed, at any rate, to belong here; to the black marsh, the trees with their roots deep underwater and their branches strung with lianas.

I kept on glancing back, expecting to see these sinister brothers hanging behind, but they had disappeared into some hidden creek or bayou. Feeling absurd as I did so, I crouched as low as I could in the boat and kept up as fast and zigzaggy a course as I could manage. I was torn between giggling at the idiocy of the encounter and being terrified out of my wits. After another five miles, I settled for a shaky sort of laughter.

The town of Hickman showed a long way off across the floodplain on the Kentucky shore. An ancient volcanic rumble had thrown up the only craggy hill in miles of flat mud, and Hickman was a ruddy stain high in the trees. It had a perfect, hidden harbor. A wide bayou emptied into the Mississippi from behind a wooded bar, and gave Hickman its private lake. It looked as if no one used it much. A few floating wooden shacks were moored among the willows, and the U.S. Coast Guard cutter had its own wharf. I tied up there and talked to the coastguards-men. There was “nothing” in Hickman. The hotel was dead. Yeah, there was a store or two, but I wouldn’t find any place to sleep nearer than Union City, fifteen miles away over in Tennessee.

One of the officers said he had nothing to do. He’d be happy to drive me to Union City in the Coast Guard truck. It was a kind offer, a long way out of his duty; it was also a disappointment. I wanted to stay in Hickman. It had looked so right: a real river town of old brick, old timber, old painted storefronts, stepped and huddled on its hill. Before the Civil War it had been a big tobacco port; since, it had been gently moldering, never turning into a ghost town, never recovering its former importance. There was still the smell of old prosperity around Brooklyn Street, a sense that next year, perhaps, the closed shops would open again and the hotel be busy with traveling salesmen. There was also the sense that people had been thinking exactly this thought about Hickman every year since 1865 or thereabouts.

In Union City there was just another anonymous motor lodge with the same blue spread on the bed, the same stippled peach paper on the wall. The bar, though, was more interesting; it didn’t sell liquor.

“You don’t have bourbon? You don’t even have wine?”

“You’re in Obion County now. We’re dry here. You want bourbon or wine, you’re going to have to find yourself a bootlegger.”

“So, how easy is it to find a bootlegger?”

“George!” shouted the woman bartender.

“Yes, ma’am.” George came out from behind a pillar. He was tall, shambling and black. He wore dungarees and a floral apron.

“There’s your bootlegger for you. Just tell George what you want and he’ll go get it for you.”

In five minutes George returned with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. At least, he returned with a brown paper bag in which he said there was a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

“Now sir,” said the bartender, “you know about brown-bagging?”

“No. I’ve never heard of it.”

“Well, that bottle’s got to stay in that brown bag. You want to have a drink with your meal in the ray-ester-rong, you hold the bottle in the bag when you pour it in the glass. Okay? That way it makes it all legal, you understand?”

“Legal? It doesn’t sound legal to me.”

“Yes sir. Brown-bagging is
legal
. What’s
illegal
is carrying around your bottle without your bag.”

I suspected that I was being hoaxed. If I was, it was an astonishingly elaborate practical joke. There must have been fifty people in the restaurant and at least thirty brown bags. Brown bags were tipping into glasses with the even rhythm of oil pumps working in line across a desert. Brown bags were stored on the moquette seat beside one. The bootlegger in his floral apron was kept constantly on the hop. He would come in with armfuls of brown bags which he would distribute around the tables. I warmed to brown-bagging. It seemed both far madder, and much more fun, than Prohibition.

Nosing out of the bayou on Sunday morning, I saw an electric ripple twisting away from the boat toward a clump of bullrushes. My first water moccasin. There would be no trailing my fingers over the side of the gunwale from now on; the bite of a water moccasin was supposed to be deadlier than that of a rattlesnake, and the backwaters of the lower river were infested with these vipers. Since passing the border between Iowa and Missouri I had felt the steady accretion of Southernness. The voices had slowed and turned more musical in their phrasing; the architecture had aged and sprouted trailing wrought-iron balconies and trellises; the vegetation had grown knottier and more festooned. Now the South was coming in a rush of symbols: squashed-faced pirates,
lianas, brown-bagging, water moccasins. That, though, was to see things the wrong way around. The real presence of the South was in its absences. It wasn’t new and raw. The towns on the upper river had been founded by the grandparents and great-grandparents of the people who lived there now, and there was still something makeshift and temporary about them. They grazed and gashed the landscape in which they were built, and it wasn’t hard to imagine the landscape closing over them again.

The odd thing about Hickman had been that it was somehow un-threatened. Its survival on the hill was dependent on a deep capacity for not being mussed and ruffled. Its old warehouses looked as if they might have been thrown up in the same quake that had made the hill; its walnut trees must have been planted when the far bank of the river was held by Spaniards. It didn’t have to prove itself, or make good. It was simply
there
, in the stolid, unselfconscious way that small old European towns are there, because no one has ever thought of questioning their right to be.

The chute below Island No. 8 (no affectionate upper-river names now; just numbered hazards) was busy. A downstream tow was hanging above it, waiting to “back up” down. Its pilot told me over the radio that two more tows were making their way up the chute, out of sight round the bend. They crept painfully forward past a willow bar, their screws thrashing against another glacial hill of water.

“Okay, Cap, you can go in ahead of us now. Ain’t nothing coming up, and we’ll be taking a while going through—”

“Thank you,” I said, not quite having the nerve to say “ ‘Preciate it” as I knew I should.

“Have a good trip, now—”

It was like riding a long slide on a children’s playground. The boat streamed with the current. It was going much too fast to boil or eddy; for a mile and a half the water had the immaculate polish of new silver. There wasn’t a scratch on it. The land was moving by at speed, but the river looked absolutely still. Rounding the bend below the chute, I was surprised by the sudden chunkiness of the water; I had forgotten that there was a wind at all.

The springy little breakers and scattered whitecaps slowed me down. It was hard to see boils until I was right on top of them, and I had to guess where the eddies were likely to lie from the shape of the bends. Twice I felt the boat making a crabwise skid from under me, and saw the oily peak of a boil showing above the waves just ahead. I counted off the mile markers on the shore. 908.3. 907.0. 903.6. They seemed to be coming very slowly. At the bottom of the reach, the river started
out on a huge meander. It was divided from itself by a neck of woodland only three-quarters of a mile wide, but I would have to go off around a twenty-mile loop before I reached the water I could see beyond the trees.

At the apex of the loop, all of New Madrid was hidden behind a grassy levee except its water tower, its grain elevator and the white wooden steeple of a church. I lugged the boat clear of the waves and caught the town napping through a long, warm Sunday afternoon. Fall was late here. The trees were thick with leaves, the air loud with starlings, and butterflies blew down Mott Street, scraps of pure color like flakes of marbled paint in the wind. Old men sat out on their verandas smoking pipes; and somewhere in the deep tangle of foliage and frame houses there was the monotonous
cheep-cheep
of a child’s swing.

The only place that didn’t seem shut up for Sunday was the police station: at least, its door was wide open to the street. No one was there, though. Snooping, I walked past the desk and found New Madrid’s solitary cell. That too was open. Sunlight fell through an overhead grille and printed more bars down the concrete wall. There were a narrow metal bed, a thin mattress, a seatless toilet; a miserable little space, just big enough to sleep in, shit, and repent the reasons that had brought one down to this. One prisoner had left his night thoughts penciled in erratic capital letters on the wall.