The Same River Twice (5 page)

We rode the train to Prospect Park. Jahi wore a pair of brand-new jodhpurs given to her by her sugar daddy, a phrase I didn't understand. We found a bunch of kids on ancient mares with cracked saddles. The guy in charge was a weight lifter named Tony, dressed in boots, Stetson, and fringed shirt. When I asked where he was from, he said, “Roun' de co'nuh.”

Tony led his motley posse along a dirt path through the park. The horses walked a lazy single file. Half an hour later they still strolled with heads down, performing their function like machines. I was embarrassed for the animals, domesticated to disgrace.

Tony left the path for a wide paved road that curved around a pond. The horses began a brief trot. Following instinct, I snapped the reins across the horse's neck and hunkered down. A gallop was much easier to ride. The old mare lifted her head and, for the first time since retiring to Brooklyn, heaved into a run. Her hooves sounded odd pounding the tar. I guided her to the outside and around the others. Jahi whooped behind me.

Tony shouted for me to stop, his face red and snarling, finally looking as if he was from the neighborhood instead of Montana. I floated above the pavement, well seated and moving with the mare's rhythm, I looked for Jahi and saw a horse following at full speed. Someone screamed. I reined in and a horse shot past me, its rider slowly tilting sideways like a centaur splitting at the seam. The horse swerved toward the edge of the road. The rider slid from the saddle. His head slammed against a streetlight, spinning his body in a pinwheel, slinging blood that spattered the street.

A few hundred people formed a tight circle around the kid. Teenage boys dared each other to step in the blood. An ambulance arrived. Tony was mad and wanted to fight but Jahi pulled me away, screaming that she'd sue. She held very tightly to my arm, pushing her groin against my leg. Her palms were hot.

We took a cab to her apartment. She hurried upstairs and when I walked in, she was waiting, bent over the back of the couch with the jodhpurs at her ankles.

“Please, Chris,” begged her disembodied voice.

Mechanically I unbuckled my pants. As I lowered them, I heard again the sound of the boy's head hitting the steel pole, like a boot dropped into a fifty-gallon drum. Swallowing bile, I turned and ran down the steps. The public sacrifice had been too great, too unexpected. I was unable to merge with the priestess for recovery of life.

I wandered Flatbush in a muddled stupor. The day's event unfurled in my head at varying speeds. I watched the scene from above in slow motion, seeing myself on a tiny horse. I became the kid sliding for miles from the saddle, waiting for impact. I became Tony, drop-jawed and aghast, primed for a fight. I was the horse; I was Jahi; I was the bored medic. I was anyone but myself.

I missed work for a week, staying in bed like a hog wrapped in the warm, wet mud of misery. When I finally went to the warehouse, Jahi called, petulant and forgiving. I hung up on her laughter and never saw her again.

A week later, on my twentieth birthday, I joined some guys playing football in Riverside Park. Quick and lean with good hands, I made a spectacular catch on a thirty-yard pass. The ball was spiraling high, thrown too hard and over my head. I leaped, twisting in the air to snag it from the sky, seeing at my zenith the New Jersey smokestacks reflected in the river's glare. My left foot landed one way while my momentum carried me the other. A tackier smashed me a third direction altogether.

The next day I limped to a hospital and emerged with my left leg encased in plaster. The knee ligaments were destroyed but I was happy. The cast gave me a legitimate reason for going home. I rode an airplane for the first time and my mother picked me up in Lexington. She drove me two hours into the eastern hills, where the community accepted my return as a wounded hero. My family's attitude was one of justice having been done; the cosmos had exacted its price for the sheer audacity of leaving the land. Dad and I drank beer together, a rite we'd never performed before. He repeated again and again, “They shoot horses in your shape.”

The cast was due for removal in eight weeks but took ten because the local doctor had to import a special cutting tool. He was so impressed with the New York cast that he asked to keep it. My leg revealed itself pale, withered, and hairless. Every evening, I filled a purse with rocks, fastened it to my ankle, and lifted it from a sitting position. Between repetitions I plucked ticks from the dogs, watching night arrive. The black air seeped down the hills to fuse land and sky in a darkness absent from the city.

My acting career had failed but I had been to all the museums, and many galleries. The paintings overpowered me. I often sat for hours before a single canvas, studying each nuance of brushstroke, seeking to understand not the painting, but the painter. Galleries had the effect of a swift cold shower. Museums left me exhausted. Limping in the womb of the hills, I decided to become a painter without ever having applied brush to canvas. First, I needed a job to finance the supplies. Second, I needed unusual clothes. Third and most important, I needed inspiration.

I thought of Jahi offering herself as reward for violence. I had shunned the ritual as a petrifact. Becoming a grownup had to mean more than sex, needed to be independent of women. The traditional arena of sports had left me with a leg unable to tolerate the required pivots. I could stay at home and cut trees, dig the earth, and kill animals, but using nature as my testing ground would prove nothing. The woods were full of damaged men. Nature always won.

W
illows are budding along the river, and young birds already sing from the nest. Rita's had an easy first couple of months. She sleeps late, takes a daily nap, and has vomited only once. Until then, we were afraid that since she'd had no morning sickness, there might be something wrong, I was proud of her mess.

Lately she has begun traipsing from the closet to the mirror.

“Do I look pregnant?” she asks.

“No,” I say, believing that she's trying to hide her weight. She curls on the bed and cries. I join her, stroking her hair, slowly realizing that she's been choosing clothes to emphasize her belly, not conceal it. Rita wants everyone to know. Since becoming pregnant, she leans her shoulders back and rubs her stomach, resembling someone who just ate a fine meal, instead of a woman carrying a child. Now she's finally showing.

Barring outright violence, the worst move a man can make is abandoning a pregnant woman. The act, however, is not uncommon. I now understand the motivation as uncontrollable fear, rather than desire for freedom or a different mate. Male terror looms in tandem with the woman's rising belly. She is changing; he is not. Her body and mind drastically alter day by day while he's still the knucklehead he always was.

The prospect of spending a life with Rita impels a scrutiny of her smallest traits that aggravate me like saddle burrs. In the woods I speculate on which habit will drive me to mania at age sixty—not screwing the lid on a ketchup bottle hard enough, or leaving her clothes scattered like pollen about the house. She would prefer that I answer the phone politely and change my clothes more often. The compromise of pair bonding is the acceptance of previously unacceptable personal traits.

In Kentucky there are two clubs for young boys—4-H and Future Farmers of America. I joined both for the field trips, one of which was to the state fair. We were bused two hundred miles to the grounds—a vast spectacle, bigger than the nearest town in the hills. One exhibit was of a live cow with a plexiglas window in its side. The hide had been peeled back, the flesh removed, and I could watch the churning of its digestive system, the regurgitation and movement of food from one stomach to another. It turned me against milk for a year.

If I could somehow see inside Rita, I'd feel less uneasy about the baby. The library books say it's an embryo until the eighth week, when all the organs are formed. At that point it's a fetus the size of a thumb. Photographs make me think of a tiny whale, its heart directly behind the mouth, an eating machine. There is no peephole to Rita's belly but I have to accept that a baby's in there. As with God or black holes, one goes by the surrounding evidence.

Yesterday the county Civil Defense warned us of impending flood. They offered free sand, but we'd have to fill the bags ourselves. I drank coffee all night, crossing the yard with a flashlight every half hour. The water rose faster than Rita's belly. I held tightly to a post, as if the river might suck me into its current. I imagined Rita and me in the boat, the typewriter and child between us, hunting a knoll. Trees crashed into the river, the soil of their roots eaten away by the swiftly rising water. The storm continued through the night.

At dawn today the river's dark surface runs thick as milk. It has crested two feet from our bank. A single goose sits fifty yards away, black-necked with a white patch on his throat like a chin strap to a lost helmet. It hasn't moved in two hours. Lightning has sheared a branch from a tree, and the trunk is scarred by the burn. Siberian shamans made sacred drums from such trees, but this one isn't fresh enough. After twelve hours, the electricity's power has faded. Beneath its overhang a great blue heron breaks from shore, long neck tucked in a curl, wings lifting slowly like a prehistoric bird. A bloated cow floats by, eyeholes pecked to vacancy by crows.

The anchor for my boat is a coffee can filled with cement. The rope is too short for the sudden rise of water. It holds the bow below the surface, the anchor line a false umbilicus. The motor rides high in the back while the gas tank drifts between seats. The boat is filled with river. All the life jackets have floated away.

A line of geese flies downriver, shifting direction as a group, following the telepathy of flight. Ravens can be taught to copy human speech, and I suppose if my tongue were split, I could talk with birds. They would impart the secrets of their hollow bones, and I could tell them how lucky they were to limit reproduction to eggs. An outbuilding is drifting by, a wooden shed built too near the bank for safety. A squirrel crouches on the ridgepole. A coil of wire still hangs from a nail.

Rita is at work. She dropped me off at home after our monthly checkup. We feel lucky to have our doctor; she is honest and forthright. It is like visiting a favorite sister. She allows me to peek over her shoulder when shining a flashlight deep into Rita's innards. Everything's red in there. I don't know what I'm seeing and don't want to ask. After the exam, the doctor says Rita has an “easy uterus.” If a man had said that, I might have been offended.

She smeared grease on Rita's belly and pressed a microphone left of her navel. A cord ran to a small speaker. We listened to the fetal heartbeat miked in the tiny room. The baby had a quick rhythm that harmonized with Rita's slower pulse. I asked if we could turn off the lights and listen. Rita nodded to the doctor; they allow me little moments, slight involvements. The twining sounds of heartbeat reminded me of the night of the storm. The baby is rain. Rita is the steady gush of river. I am alone in the dark on the bank.

In the aftermath of flood, the river hurts like a man's blood when his brother dies. Plastic trash hangs in tree limbs to mark the water's crest. Beavers are chewing high on the trees, and after the waters recede, there will be evidence to suggest giant beavers—the tapered marks of their teeth far above my head. I have a need to believe in giants because the real ones are gone: three-toed sloths, the buffalo, soon the elephant. During flood, young beavers can drown in their hutch, trapped by the flow. Rita's body is heavy with fluid. There can be no sandbagging against a child, no evacuation, no warning of miscarriage.

A picnic table from town floats upside down near my bank. I tie a brick to a rope and chase the table a half mile before lassoing it on a lucky shot. I loop the rope around a tree. When the flood goes away, I'll drag the table into our yard. We'll have picnics and carve our names into the wood. I am practicing for the role of provider. My boots are scuffed and muddy.

The current is slower in the space just after a bend, and I watch a brave cormorant trying to fish there. Its skinny neck pokes from the surface like a snake. They migrate twice yearly and this one must have gotten lost in the storm, separated from its flock. Cormorants lack the waterproofing oil of ducks, thus are able to swim underwater, hunting fish. A thousand years of this has given them huge webbed feet set far enough back on the body to act as flippers. This makes them top-heavy. When a cormorant tries to walk on land, it falls to its chest like a dog on ice.

I feel a similar awkwardness now, unsure of what I've done, what I must later do. I'm not afraid of aging but of how the aged are supposed to behave. Science claims that human superiority is the result of a prolonged infancy and childhood; it seems more like luck to me. The cormorant can swim and fly, like the baby in Rita's womb. I am stuck with common walking. This flood is nothing compared with the coming deluge.

A ruined canoe has jammed itself into the riverbank, rearing like a tombstone marking the future of the past. Its dark, shiny bow reminds me of the dolphins who attempted dry terrain eons back. They slid onto the sun-warmed rocks and stayed long enough to lose their gills and miss the sea. Many dolphins fled to safety, but an outpost remained. They slowly became earless seals, marooned forever at the edge of dirt and water, I wonder if fatherhood will be the same.

I
left Kentucky as soon as the doctor pronounced me healed, a diagnosis only physically correct. I roamed the country on foot, finding day labor and cheap rooms. I was a perpetual new face, the truck stop beggar, the sleeper on a bench, a tired battered bum not quite twenty-one. Each time my life became simple, a boss offered a promotion, or a woman wanted love. Fearing a trap, I grabbed my pack and left another life behind, heading like Daniel Boone for elbow room.

I moved vaguely through America and picked up a few more jobs—moving furniture, picking fruit, tarring a roof, driving a truck—all of which I despised. The effort of labor reminded me of a hangover. If you can only get through the next few hours, both come to an end. The tough part is accepting the wait until you can eat and drink again.