Authors: Jonathan Raban
There were sharp rips and creases in the current now, as if the Mississippi were trying to tear itself apart; but the most scary change was the succession of great waxy boils. I could see them coming from a long way off. Most of the river was lightly puckered by the wind, but there were patches of what looked like dead-calm water: circular in shape, a hundred yards or so across. I took them for quiet millponds, good places to light a pipe or unscrew the cap of a thermos flask. Delighted to find that the Mississippi now afforded such convenient picnic spots, I drove straight for one. As I hit its edge, the boat slewed sideways and
I was caught on the rim of a spinning centrifuge. I had mistaken it for calm water because its motion was so violent that no wind could disturb it. I could see the cap of the boil far away in the middle, a clear eighteen inches higher than the rest of the river. From this raised point, the water was spilling around and down the convex face, disappearing deep into the crack in which my boat was caught. Running the engine at full speed, I yanked myself out easily enough; but I had felt the river trying to suck me under, boat and all, and I was tense with fright. I grounded on a sandbar and scrabbled in my grip for tobacco and Valium.
From the top of my small Crusoe island, I sized up the Mississippi as an enemy. It was dappled with large whorls of treacherously smooth water. Wherever the current thrust against the bank on the far side of a bend it created an “eddy”—a local euphemism for a whirlpool as big as a baseball field.
Take bends on the inside shore
.
At least I could see a reason for these eddies and learn to predict them before they swallowed me, but I couldn’t explain the boils. They came sprouting up from the river bottom, often in mid-channel, miles from any tongue of sand or rock. Their mushroom tops gleamed nastily, like patent leather. I spotted three of the things and tried to read the river to account for them; it wouldn’t yield a clue.
When I was sixteen and my forehead was pitted with acne, I had gone to a chemist’s shop, lurking around the pharmacist’s counter until the girls were out of earshot. The pharmacist thought I wanted to buy contraceptives; all I wanted was a cure for my beastly spots, and I confided my problem to him in a shrouded confessional voice. “At your age,” he said, indecently loudly, “you’ve got so much energy in your body that it’s got to come out somewhere. Don’t worry. It’s perfectly natural.”
Ignorant bloody fink
, I thought, and left. Looking at the boils on the face of the Mississippi, I realized that the pharmacist had had more sense than I had given him credit for. It was just the sheer energy of the river breaking out in these ugly blooms and swellings. There were no prescriptions for the condition; I was going to have to learn to live with it as I’d lived with my spots. The boils did have one good point: because they burst outward, they would tend to throw a boat off them. An eddy could draw one into its vortex like a sea anemone sucking on a child’s finger.
I spent half an hour talking myself into setting off again. I was back to being a novice, as callow as I had been when I’d left Minneapolis. There was another parallel, too, with that first start, and it troubled me. The voyage had begun with my running away from London; now I was running away from another city. Sally’s word rankled.
Coward.
It didn’t hit any nail quite directly on the head, but it gave a good glancing blow to one nail, at least.
She had been right to tag me as a runner-away. The only marriage I contracted had been walked out of a year later. When I had a steady job, with increments, promotion and a pension plan, I left it fast. Marital life and an office in a university with my name on the door had made the sky seem very low and very gray. I had no gift for permanence, for building slowly year by year until one had constructed a life like a granite-fronted branch of a First National Bank. I wanted to wriggle out from under the stones, and I had developed a dubious talent as an escape artist. Running away was something that had started as simple compulsion; now it was what I was good at. Some men are good at French cookery and putting up shelves; my specialty was the quiet exit through the back door, sneakers across the lawn and the relief of the cool air outside. On my river trip, I thought, I am doing only what I have always been doing: keeping the sky up by keeping on the run.
But
coward?
I kept the boat’s nose headed up on the slippery water, made a wide and circling detour to skirt a boil, tucked myself close in to the Illinois shore around the bend at Michael’s Towhead, exhilarated and absorbed. If riding the river was like anything else in life at all, it was like writing. One could lose oneself in the delicate business of keeping afloat and on course in just the same way as one could lose oneself in the pleasure and hazard of inching along through the words on a page, feeling for the main drift of the current and trying not to run aground. One needed a degree of disengagement to do either. Maybe Sally was right, and it was a streak of cowardice that impelled me to do both.
At Mile 132 a “towhead,” half a mile wide and two miles long, swung out from the Missouri bank and squeezed the river into a tight chute. Three big tows were pulled up in line behind it, waiting to take the fast water. I ran ashore, afraid of getting in their way. The tows on the upper Mississippi had been alarming enough; these were monsters. Because of the locks, tow fleets above St. Louis had been limited to a maximum of seventeen barges. The ones across the river had twenty-five and thirty barges each; six acres of killer steel and rolling wake. The towboats themselves had correspondingly bigger engines. When they passed, they didn’t just leave their wakes behind; their enormous screws kicked up a series of swirling humps in the water. For a mile or more after they had gone by, the glistening humps would hang in the
river, balls of solid turbulence, capable of doing God-knows-what to a sixteen-foot aluminum boat.
A tow fleet loaded with, I reckoned, forty-five thousand tons of cement approached the head of the chute with the caution of a cat burglar. It was moving so slowly that it seemed to be trying to con the river into thinking that it wasn’t there at all. As soon as its leading barges touched the point where the river gathered itself together for the long sprint down, the towboat went thrashing into reverse, its rear end spuming. It was “backing up”: driving backward against the current so that it moved down the chute far more slowly than the racing water. Tows which failed to “back up” and decided to just go with the flow were liable to hit the state of Missouri with such a bang that people up in Columbia and Kansas City would report earthquake tremors. Their fleets broke loose, and stray barges of cement and grain landed on sandbars ten miles downstream.
The tricks of the current were so peculiar in this stretch of river that even the most careful tows often came apart. Already I had seen towboats go nannying about the stream in search of their lost charges and found twelve-hundred-ton cargoes nestling deep in mud and willows. A boil or an eddy could wrench at a barge, snap its hawsers and carry it off on a private voyage of its own. If it could do that to a barge … but pursuing that thought would definitely be an act of cowardice.
I took the chute between tows. Rocks, sand and winter trees went sizzling past. The river here was just two hundred yards wide, and millions of gallons of water were sluicing through this narrow conduit. The current must have been running at close to ten knots, a terrific speed for a navigable river. Upstream tows, driving at full power against the chute, hung, apparently motionless on the water, the camel humps of their screw wakes trailing out behind them as they muscled their way forward.
Following me down the chute was a white yacht, a millionaire’s toy of the kind I’d seen lounging by the dozen, up to no good, around the bay at Monte Carlo. It overtook me, throwing up a wake as big as that of a tow. I caught a glimpse of the jeans, rusty suntans and straggly hair of the man and the girl up in the wheelhouse. The girl waved at me. She could afford to. She didn’t have to deal with her sweeping rollers curling above my bow. I didn’t wave back.
River people called these yachts “snow geese.” They spent their summers up in the Great Lakes, where tycoons from Chicago and Detroit entertained their clients aboard them. In the fall, they were taken down the Mississippi to the Florida Keys and the Bahamas, to
be picked up by their owners for Christmas vacations and business weekends. Their professional crews who took care of them during their monthlong voyages in the spring and fall were an odd and scruffy gang. Like me, they were runners-away. Many had dropped out of college. Some had worked as deckhands on the tows. The men wore rings on their fingers and crucifixes on their chests. The women, swathed in layers of jersey, looked like roustabouts and talked pure Ivy League. We kept on bumping into each other in wharfside bars.
“You taught at
Smith?
Well, shit. I was at Bennington. You know Bernard Malamud? I audited his class. Hey, Steve, this guy was at Smith—he was a professor.…” And Steve, who had majored in towboating and came from Greenville, Arkansas, turned on me with a long, dark backcountry stare.
“Now, is that so?” He looked as if he were fingering a gun.
“You read his books? Professor Malamud’s?”
“Yeah, sure.…”
But I was afraid of Steve’s eyes. I thought that a cozy discussion of
Idiots First
and
The Magic Barrel
might make him reach for his revolver. This was a pity. Steve, Ms. Bennington and I had a world in common. We didn’t have to talk about books: we might have had a useful seminar on the subject of what had made us all run.
I put in at a lime dock and ferry landing just short of Sainte Genevieve on the Missouri shore and pulled the boat up onto a rocky beach under the trees. The town had been a port once, shipping lead and grain downriver. Now it was stranded, a mile inland. Gabouri Creek, up which the steamboats used to run, had silted in long before. My chart showed that the town still had a “Front Street”—just a name: the last relic of Sainte Genevieve’s dependence on the Mississippi.
I heaved my cases over the railroad tracks and sat at the bottom of the gravel road that led up to town. Somewhere nearby there was the steady
whup-whup
of gunfire. The shots came closer. They turned into a young man with a sad mustache, glooming along a wooded creek with a Magnum rifle. He was zapping the hell out of beer cans. Soon he was standing right across from me, over the tracks.
Whup-piaow!
Another goner. His face had the heavy, expended look of postcoital
tristesse
. I wondered whom he had been squinting at with such rapt fury: wife? dad? boss? mother-in-law? He took another bead on the can, just to make sure, and missed. “Shit!” he said. “Fuckin’ goddamn shit!”
“Hi,” I said, thinking it about time I revealed myself before I got mistaken for a beer can or Charlie Cong.
“What you doin’ there, man?”
“I don’t know. Waiting for a lift up to town. I just got off a boat.”
He rattled back the bolt of his gun, and the spent cartridge flipped out onto the gravel siding.
“You see …” he said slowly, “what I mean to say is, these goddamn sights ain’t right yet. New gun. I got to fix ’em. Oncet I get the blame things adjusted up right …”
He didn’t need to apologize to me for killing his father. I said, “Sure. I used to shoot myself once. It takes a long time to get sights properly leveled.”
“Yeah. I come out here most days … shoot along the crick awhile.… Them sights, though, they’re kind of tricky sonofabitches. So, you want a ride?”
He drove me into Sainte Genevieve in his black Chevy pickup. It was the sort of small American town in which green “historical markers” outnumber all other varieties of vegetation. Sainte Genevieve had been founded in 1735, and there was hardly a patch of ground in the place that didn’t warrant a historical marker. The only serious omission was the filling station. Its gas pumps looked to me as if they were vintage 1950s Redcoat-soldier style and had a better right to a historical marker than half the other sites in town. I tried to find a bar that wasn’t historic, failed, and ended up in “The First Brick Building West of the Mississippi.” I had the nagging sense that it wasn’t by any means the first brick building west of the Mississippi that I’d been in. What was beyond doubt was the fact that it was the first brick building west of the Mississippi in which I had met a drunk with an artificial larynx.
He was shriveled and lachrymose. He asked me what I was up to; when I told him that I was riding the river, he chawed and spat and said, “He’ll bury your ass, you don’t treat him right.” The words came out on one note, in a deep mechanical bass like a speak-your-weight machine.
“You got a radio?”
“No.”
“You believe in God?”
This particular question always spelled trouble.
“I’m asking you, feller. You believe in God?”
“Well … not exactly; no.”
“I don’t believe in
Jesus,
” he said, surprisingly. “Know who I believe in? I believe in the Head Nut. Know who I mean?” He looked significantly toward the ceiling of the bar. “He’s somethin’ else.”
I opened my notebook and made a show of writing
Sainte Genevieve, Tuesday, October 30
. But the larynx was impatient of my literary activities.
“Hey, feller—I’m asking you. How’d you make a baby? How’d you grow a blade o’ grass? Shit! There ain’t no way. It’s really hard for me to figure out. You got an answer to that?”
“No.”
“There’s gotta be some Superior Being.”
“Perhaps.”
“ ‘Course there has to be! That’s the proof, I’m telling you. You can’t make a baby. You can’t grow a blade o’ grass. That’s the job of the Head Nut. Know what I mean?”
“I expect you’re right,” I said, and tried to get on with my notebook.
“Know who I admire the most? The one guy I look up to in the world today? The Pope. That bastard,
he
told them how it was. A simple man. He told them politicians and professors … Just a simple man …” His eyes bloomed with tears. They started to drip down his cheekbones. “A simple man … he could tell the whole goddamn world … Shit. Pope … John … Paul. Yeah. He told them how it was.”