Old Glory (54 page)

I read it in the vomit-smelling “Riverside” bar, which wasn’t by the
river but stood inside the equally misnamed “Sea Wall.” The
Pemiscot Journal
seemed almost as bewildered as I was by the absence of excitement in Caruthersville. The most interesting piece of news it had managed to rake up for its banner front-page headline was
HIGH SCHOOL GETS NEW WINDOWS
. “The Colson Company rewarded its employees with a chili lunch last Friday” also made the front page. Inside, the “Local & Society” section sounded more in my line.

Gladys Tinsley, at least, was certainly getting around; but why had she not enjoyed the day in Dyersburg? Perhaps there was a germ of something here. I went on to an account of how the City of Caruthersville had spent public money during the month of October.

I wondered if Fred Noah’s profitable trade in red rock and the entry for tear gas were obscurely connected. Who had broken the toilet? and who was going to be buried at public expense in the cemetery? I left Caruthersville with a great many unanswered questions and a happy disinclination to pursue them further. Flaubert, I suspected, would have loved the town; it would have made a perfect, oppressive setting for Emma Bovary as she looked forward to shopping and enjoying the day at Blytheville with Margie and Alma.

The river had settled into a smooth, loping stride. Just south of Caruthersville, Missouri dissolved into Arkansas somewhere behind the levee on my right. Around the wide curve of Barfield Bend I saw two tow fleets coming upstream in convoy. There was plenty of room for all of us; the Mississippi was more than a mile across here, and although the channel stuck close in to the Arkansas shore, there was a broad
reach of open water on the Tennessee side. I had wanted to stop and look at Tomato, Arkansas; the first town in my eighth state was named so enjoyably that I thought it couldn’t help holding other pleasures too. Seeing the tows push up toward Tomato Landing, I decided to skip it and cut away to the far side of the river.

It was easy water. I could fill a pipe and let the boat take care of itself, idling along a few hundred yards out from the edge of the forest. I had gone a mile or so when I saw a line of long, crookbacked breakers with an edge of white peeling from their tops. For a tow’s wake they seemed to have traveled an unusual distance across the river, but then, both tow fleets were big, and perhaps their wakes had married. Running the engine as fast as it would go, I turned the boat around and headed upstream toward the shore.

At least, that was what I had meant to do. I couldn’t work out what was wrong. I seemed to be going faster than I’d ever been before, with the entire surface of the river pouring by in a glassy race of logs, twigs, cola cans and orange crates. The whole world was going past, a stream of pure motion. Yet I was making no wake at all. The river behind me was as unruffled as the river in front, although I could feel the propellor churning hard against the torrential movement of the water. I had quite lost my sense of place and dimension. I looked across to the trees on the bank. They were moving too: wavering slightly, then slipping back, as if they were being tugged up against the grain of the current. So if I was moving at all, I must be going backward downstream, when it felt as if I were traveling up it at an improbable speed.

There was no question of running in to the shore. The forest grew right out into the river, and the trees were knee-deep in water, with no space to slip a boat between them. I tried to get my bearings by switching my eyes from the boat to the streaming current, to the willows and to the sky. We were all out of sync with each other: all in motion, but in different directions and at different speeds. The line of breakers was now only a hundred yards behind me. I spun the boat around and went with the flow of things. For a few minutes, there was a lot of jolting and splashing, and then the long calm of the main channel again.

It was as near as I had come to meeting the river face to face. The Mississippi had behaved perfectly in character. It had been a neat and nasty confidence trick. That invitingly placid water must have been racing at fourteen or fifteen miles an hour over a shallow ledge of sand. Its speed had made it look deep when in reality there was probably only three or four feet between the surface and the bottom. I was still enough of a greenhorn to have been completely gulled.

Yet there was a queer, scary elation in feeling myself poised so fragilely on that sweep of river, watching the forest and sky tremble and start to run. I had touched the deep stillness of the Mississippi; it was as if the world moved around the river and not the river through the world. For a few moments, I had been the pivot, the dead point in the flux; and if the sky had swiveled above my head and raised a sudden shower of stars over Tennessee, I wouldn’t have been especially surprised.

When I pulled up a wooded side channel into the town of Osceola, Arkansas, I felt like a sleepwalker. I was too full of the river to take in anything else. There was a motel room, but all I could see was water; gliding, streaming, spinning in on itself, sweeping up in jets from the river bottom. I sat in a café and saw more water. There were eddies on the streets. In a bar-and-poolroom I tried to steady my hand and thoughts by playing a game of pool. I lost, prematurely, as I sent the eight ball on a twisty, meandering course into the far pocket.

Since my entry into the lower river, I had been following my passage against the notes and maps in Zadok Cramer’s
The Navigator
. After 165 years they were still impressively accurate. It was true that many of Cramer’s islands had gone off to lodge a few miles upstate, where they were scratching out a landlubberly agricultural existence. When Cramer said that the channel went to the right of an island it now usually went to the left, and vice versa. Nevertheless, the portrait of the river held good in all its essentials. There wasn’t a reach on it that was not recognizable from Cramer’s descriptions.

Over breakfast the next morning, I was studying Cramer against the charts. My first big landmark of the day would be Chickasaw Bluff No. 2, where the Mississippi ran south into a cliff and made a sharp turn to the west. This was Cramer:

Here you see on the left hand a bluff bank of from 150 to 200 feet in height, singularly shaped, and variegated with different colours of the earth, of which the yellow is the most conspicuous. The river bearing hard against the bluff subjects it to an almost constant caving down, hence the face of the bluff is kept fresh in its appearance. This bluff extends about two miles down.

The river here turns short to the right, and is very narrow. Close in to the bluff is an eddy, you may keep as near the outer edge of it as you please, and the channel is safe and good though very rapid.
Island 34, along with another substantial chunk of Tennessee, had been pushed over into Arkansas by a five-mile chute which had halved the distance of the reach from what it had been in 1814. From there on, though, Cramer was as good as new.

I could see the ragged overhang of the bluff ahead, its sods of tousled grass falling away from its face and the raw streaks of blue and yellow clay. At the point of the turn, the marker buoys directed me straight into a thicket of rough water. The waves were coming up like tongues of flame, pointed and vertical. They knocked and jostled at the boat as I elbowed my way through them. This was what Cramer meant by “safe and good though very rapid.” It was rocky going, but I had to stick with the waves to avoid Cramer’s eddy. That was there, just to the left of the breakers: a deep concave circle of smooth black water. I kept as near to the outer edge of it as I pleased—which was rather farther, I imagine, than Cramer would have dared to go himself.

For several days now, the river had been rising. It had come up over the top of the dikes, which showed as long ridges of turbulence and rags of scud. It had drowned many of the trees on the shores and sandbars and turned them into “sawyers,” the oddest-looking of all the snags on the river. The current would get into the branches of the tree and slowly drag it down until it was completely underwater. Then the elasticity of the trunk would catapult it up again. The trees at the edge of the channel kept on sinking and arching their backs in a ritual rhythm; waving and drowning, waving and drowning. Eventually the river uprooted them, and one could see them spinning in the eddies-full-grown willows and cypresses, their bare roots and branches rolling over and over.

I hadn’t seen a tow all morning. It was a lonely business this, riding the swollen river with the sky bleary and the wind just high enough to raise whitecaps on the chutes and make the boat’s hull lurch and clank. The nearest towns were miles inland. I couldn’t make a landing on either shore, because there was no shore: just a swamp forest which stopped along an arbitrary line where the trees had got the better of the water. A bare sandbar gave me a brief stopping place, where I ate a handful of P. T. Ferry’s pecans and watched the movement of a big boil out in the stream. It was a grotesque, animated flower, spilling enormous petals of water from its center. It was bringing up horrible things from the bottom: rotten stumps, branches gone feathery and white with mold, chunks of black peaty stuff—all the garbage of the riverbed was being scoured out and scattered on the surface. I was certain that if I watched it long enough it would start to spew out bodies, boats, skulls.

Memphis had timed its arrival on the current at a perfect moment. On Brandywine Chute I was depressed and frightened by the Mississippi in a way I hadn’t been before. I feared its emptiness and loathed its enormous cargo of dead matter, the jungly shore, the purulent, inflamed water. Then, five miles off, in faint outline through a haze of windy humidity, there was the Hernando De Soto highway bridge. I ached for the comfort of a new big city. For a spell, I wanted to stop being a snow goose.

I
 tied up
to a pontoon on the Wolf River. The attendant in the office was a frog-faced old man with a mouthful of gold fillings, and he was as snappish as an injured dog. Resentment of the world seemed to have eaten him away from the inside; and since no one else was around, he vented his irritation at the world on me. I was in the goddamn wrong place. I could goddamn well pay in advance. I had the goddamn wrong money. He cussed and grumbled. He made an elaborate show of losing the registration book so that he could blame me for its disappearance. Scowling, breathing heavily on my shoulder, he watched me write my name and the name of my boat, hoping to catch me out in a technical breach of the regulations. His surliness was so intent and elaborate that I was more interested than rebuffed by it. I thanked him apologetically for every new rudeness and trapped him into joining me in a game. His object was to make me lose my temper with him; mine was to make him thaw. We moved our pawns into our opening gambits. I approached the coffee machine with a quarter.

“That’s members only,” the man growled.

“I’m so sorry. I should have thought to ask you first.”

There was a long glaring pause.

“Well … so long as you
pay …
”

It was almost a disappointment to win so easily. Once the man had been persuaded that I didn’t come from Tennessee or Arkansas and that, better still, I didn’t even come from the United States, he suddenly ceased to be crabby and started talking of his discontents. They centered on the city of Memphis itself.

“You know we got an election on right now? For mayor? I ain’t voting.”

“Why not?”

“Because them bastards, they ruined my private life, that’s why. What I mean is, they stopped people knowing people. Take twenty years ago. I’d go for a walk in the morning, up round Jefferson and Main, I’d see forty people I knew. I had friends in this city then. Today—know how many I’d see? Two. One, even. Some days I won’t see nobody at all. Where they all gone, I don’t know.”

I couldn’t immediately see the connection between the old man’s angry loneliness and the mayoral election. My failure to grasp the point made him spit and gulp with irritation.

“It was politicians that
done
it, for godsakes! They pulled down Beale, which they never shoulda done. But when they turned Main into that goddamn
mall
, that’s when they ruined people’s private life. Nowadays there’s only niggers there. You go in the stores—just niggers. Nothing but a lot of niggers. That’s what they done to me, and nowadays I don’t know nobody.”

Leaning heavily on the bar, the man brooded, slack-mouthed, staring out the window at his ruined city. What little light there was caught the gold in his teeth.

“Know what they done? They given Memphis to the niggers. Over on Mud Island there—niggers. You got niggers in all the stores. There’s niggers sitting out on all the benches on that mall. There’s niggers in offices, now. Whole blocks of ’em—solid niggers. They’re giving them five and six hundred bucks a month—to niggers in offices. What they got to do for it? Smoke, sass, and drink Coke all day. When I went to work, they give me eight bucks a week. Eight lousy bucks, and I had to work my ass off for it. Now I have to see them niggers giving sass and riding in new Cadillacs. You reckon that’s
fair?
”

“Well … there’s been a lot of inflation all around since you started work.”

The old man snorted and drew a heavy overcoat of silence around himself.

“So who’s running in this election, then?”

“Mayor Chandler.
He
did that to uptown.”

“And who else?”