The River Queen (35 page)

I hear, however, that the Custom House and Old Courthouse have been turned into a museum and I make my way there. The Custom House is indeed filled with tons of artifacts—arrowheads, old wagons, pictures of Cairo's founding fathers, its Civil War heroes, cradles where children once slept. I'm not there long, browsing, when Fred Shelton, who runs the place, starts telling me his story. I don't even have to ask for it. Fred, a tall gray-haired man, just starts to talk.

“I moved to Cairo in 1943 with my mom and stepdad. His name was Vernon ‘Turkey' Curtis and he was a famous baseball player from Chattanooga. He was about 90 percent Illinois Indian and he had a hot temper. He married a woman named Ruth Elizabeth. They had two children. Then he went off to war and when he returned, they divorced. Then he married my mother. Her name was also Ruth Elizabeth. Odd coincidence, no?”

“Oh, that's a coincidence, all right.” I'm trying not to gaze at my watch, but I know Jerry's going to want to push off and that Tom will be waiting for me soon with the dinghy, but Fred gives no hint of pausing.

“My mother worked at a fancy restaurant in town and the ballplayers stayed in the hotel. My stepfather played for the Senators and other teams. Anyway, one thing led to another and they got married. We moved up to Cairo when I was nine.…”

“Nine, wow…”

“Yep.” Fred doesn't skip a beat. “That was a while ago. When I was a kid, Cairo was the most important town in southern Illinois. People came here from Paducah, from Carbondale, on Friday nights. The stores stayed open until nine p.m. and you couldn't even get a parking spot. People came from Paducah just to people watch. They used to have all kinds of stores—J. C. Penney, Sears, Woolworths. You name it.” I glance around the museum and through the open windows. It is hard to imagine Cairo as the cutting edge of fine fashion. But apparently it was.

“We used to have professional baseball here in Cairo. The Cardinals trained here. The lady who drew the Cardinal logo, she was from Cairo. I was the mail carrier. From 1964 I used to make two trips a day through the business section. I had to load up two or three times. When I retired in 1999 I could carry the mail in one hand. There used to be 30,000 people, then 15,000. Now it's 3,000. It just went down. When the black people started protesting, the whites left town. I carried the mail all through that time as well. I sat with my wife and kids in the car and watched them firebomb the police station in 1968. I was a boy in Chattanooga and there was a white counter and a black counter. Here you'd get on the bus and the blacks could sit wherever. But after that man was found hung … I guess there's just hatred everywhere.”

Now it is getting late, but I am reluctant to go. I have a feeling I'm the only person who's stopped by here in days.

But Fred is cheerful and resilient. “Nice talking to you. You see anybody else out there, you just send 'em around.”

As I'm leaving Cairo I pick up a local events brochure. The next evening there's a Yard Decorating Contest. “Judging Starts at 6 p.m. Remember the theme, have your decorating completed, and your lights on.” I want to know the theme. I'm dying to know the theme, but nowhere is it written. And then on Saturday it's the Little Miss Pageant. “Contestants between the ages of 4 and 6 compete for this honor. Come and see cuteness at its finest.” The judging starts at 7. Past my bedtime.

I give Tom a call on his cell and he asks me if I can find some ice on my way back to the dinghy. I do find some in a grocery store and lug two giant sacks on my shoulders, more than I can carry, really, back down Historic 8th Street, through the flood wall opening. I come back to the dinghy and find Tom, waiting for me. “Hey,” he says. “You giving me the cold shoulder?”

He helps me on board. “Hey, we're not in such a rush,” he says. Then he takes me for an unauthorized ride in the dinghy around the Ohio River for a few minutes, while Jerry, shirtless and perplexed, stares as we whiz by.

46

S
OMEHOW WE
missed the wicket dam, which is down for high water. A warning in Quimby's tells us, “Recreational Boats Advised That Navigation Is Hazardous During These Times and Should Be Avoided.” “Well, great,” Jerry says. “We just went over it.”

Jerry has been avoiding sharing something with me, but now he does. “We don't have any more maps. Just the Quimby's,” he says.

By maps he means navigational maps. We don't have any detailed drawings of the Ohio or the Tennessee. What we have from the Army Corps of Engineers stops at Cairo. We were never planning on going this far. “Will we be okay?”

Jerry shrugs. “If nothing bad happens, we'll be fine.”

“Right…”

Approaching Lock and Dam 53 we have to lock through no matter what. A tow who doesn't speak Cajun passes and tells us he'll take us on starboard on two whistles. He's loaded with manure and we aren't exactly upwind. We pass Harrah's casino as we're looking for a dock, but don't see a place to tie up. Heading farther downstream, I'm tired and the day feels long. Suddenly I see that we are slowing down. I look up and there is, well, a fort. A real fort, or so it seems. It looks so much like a real fort that I anticipate the U.S. cavalry coming to our aid. And to my great joy I see that we are mooring here.

“Can I stretch my legs?” I ask.

“Well, considering that we have six double barges ahead of us, I don't see why not.”

I look and see them all lined up. Half a dozen of them and they're riding low and heavy. Technically, if we're willing to wait a while, they'll put us through, but who knows how long that wait might be? “Does that mean we're here for the night?”

Jerry nods. “Unless traffic suddenly eases up, guess so.”

I head up to visit the fort on shaky legs. It has been a long day from our beachhead on the Mississippi to here. I make my way up a road through a grove of hills to the visitor's center, which is closed, but I pick up a brochure, slightly sodden and mildewed, that sits in a little Lucite box. I read the following: “The replica of the 1802 American fort was finished in October of 2003. The new replica replaces the 1794 American fort built 30 years ago. The 1794 fort had been a reproduction of the first American fort built at Fort Massac. The 1802 fort was selected to replace the 1794 fort.”

Okay, when is the exam? I'm sure there's a niche industry for writers willing to compose local tourist pamphlets, but I'm not applying for the job. Crossing a wooden bridge and a dry moat, I enter the fenced-in compound. It is almost dusk on a fall evening and yet the fort is wide open. It is what one would expect—rustic, made of logs—but actually quite lovely.

It is growing darker and amber lights go on. I am alone with this replica of the past until suddenly a bus arrives. I'm hoping for reenactors. I see from the brochure that there are all kinds of “Living History” programs here. “French and Indian War reenactors are welcome.” You can actually take a basic training class for “French soldiers and militia during the 1760s” that includes military drills, mock battles, and camp life.

But for now it's just kids. They race into the fort and surround me. They're whooping it up and I am overrun. I assume it is a history lesson as I slip away. Sometimes in the half light of dusk, I still see Kate as a child. It's hard to grasp that that little girl who raced through fields is no more.

It's late when I get back to the boat and I can see a houseboat coming up alongside ours. Jerry is talking to their captain. Apparently this houseboat, named
It's Magic,
sees the same problem with the lock ahead we saw. I hear their captain ask Jerry, “Can we tie up to you for the night?”

This is proper houseboat etiquette, unlike that of the unfortunate
Bronx Cheer
encounter. “Sure,” Jerry says. “Do you have a bottle of wine?” He's joking, but they say they do. “Good, because my second officer here could use some.”

I am delighted by this exchange, thrilled to be referred to as second officer, though actually this makes me the last officer, and almost equally delighted even as they hand me a nice warm bottle of pink zinfandel. My fave. They introduce themselves. Ron and Lizzie are from Indiana and they are doing the Great Loop. Their boat is an elegantly appointed houseboat but with a cruiser engine. It has a fancy white vinyl couch and they invite us to come on board for a drink. Tom doesn't want to go. He's shy of rich people with big boats. But Jerry agrees.

We climb onto their boat and rest ourselves in wicker lounge chairs as Ron pours the pink zinfandel. “So,” he says, “I see you folks are on a houseboat too. Well we've been coming down from Lake Michigan. We started in Muskegon.”

“We started up in La Crosse,” Jerry says.

“We're going to take a whole year. I took a leave from my law firm. Well, it really is
my
law firm. That is, I started it, so I guess I can walk away from it for a while, can't I, Honey?”

Lizzie looks at him adoringly and smiles. “Of course you can.”

“I can do whatever I want. Worked hard enough to get to this point, so I'm going to enjoy it, right?” He gazes at us through his somewhat beady eyes.

We sip some of the sweet, syrupy zinfandel, but after a few minutes Jerry leaves, saying he's got work to do on the boat. I look at my watch. It's almost nine o'clock and I'm sure he doesn't have any work to do. I'm also sure he doesn't like this guy very much but I'm intrigued and glad to be sitting in a wicker chair on an elaborate white vinyl deck with Burt Bacharach on the stereo.

After Jerry's gone, Ron turns to me. “Do you believe in meant to be's?”

“Sure,” I tell him. And I do.

“Well, I just have a feeling about you, Mary. I think we were supposed to meet.” As he says this, it begins to rain. Ron looks up at the heavens. “Do you ever feel that way?”

“Well, I think we can know things. I think some things are supposed to happen.…”

“I know exactly what you mean.”

“You know,” I tell him, “once my daughter was getting on a ride at Coney Island. She stood in line for forty-five minutes for that ride and all of a sudden I went berserk. I started shouting at her that she can't go on that ride. I make my husband go and get her and everyone is angry at me. Then a few weeks later I open the newspaper and see that two children were killed on that very ride.”

Ron nods thoughtfully. “Are you a Christian, Mary?” he asks me.

I decide to answer honestly. “No, I am not.”

I expect he might ask me what I am, or display a shred of interest in my response, but he does not. “Neither am I,” he says, staring deep into my eyes. We are coconspirators now. “I'm a heathen. I've lived many times before. I'm a sorcerer. I traffic in white magic.” Why me? I want to ask. Why do I wind up with guys like this? But he goes on. “In a previous life I was a Viking. I have raped and pillaged. I have done horrible things I am not proud of and I have gone through several life cycles of repentance.”

His sweet wife, Lizzie, gazes at him with adoring eyes. Clearly she has heard this before and is unfazed.

I suppose this beats alien abduction, but I am at a loss for words. I only know I'm on their boat in the dark and Tom and Jerry are nowhere to be seen. They've probably gone off into the woods to pee. And I'll never see them again. “How do you know you are a sorcerer?” I ask, trying to be polite.

He gazes at his wife. “Shall I tell her?”

Lizzie smiles demurely. “I think you can.”

“Well, you see, one day, a few years ago, I was driving and there was this guy, riding my tail. He annoyed me and I threw my hand back, just in an impatient gesture, you understand.…” I assume this is the sorcerer's equivalent of flicking someone the bird. “And all of a sudden I heard this big boom and I looked back and saw that his engine had caught fire and exploded.”

“Wow,” I say, my eyes popping out of my head.

“I've done this one or two other times. You know, when someone really deserved it, but since then I've had to be very careful. I have to learn how to manage my anger. I can't just go do that anymore, can I, Lizzie?”

Lizzie shakes her head. “You certainly cannot.”

“I've known about my powers for a while. I try to use them sparingly. I try to help people. Tell them if they are in danger, if they are safe.”

The zinfandel is starting to make me swoon. Outside I can hear a driving rain. I am wondering how I can make my exit gracefully. “So am I in danger? Am I safe?” I am trying not to make these questions seem rhetorical.

Ron reaches across and puts my hands in his chubby fists. His hands are exceptionally warm and at any moment I expect to be vaporized. He closes his eyes and begins to hyperventilate. Then he stares at me with piercing eyes. “You are safe for now,” he tells me in a deep preacher's voice. “But you are very very lucky. This time you were lucky. I cannot say what will happen next.”

And all I can think is that I am very lucky that I didn't wind up on his boat. I am very lucky that Tom and Jerry aren't nut jobs or psychos and I am willing them to come rescue me. I'm starting to think about what to do next when I see Jerry poking his head over the side. “Hi there, Mary. Just wondering what you're up to.”

“Oh, I was thinking of coming back.”

“Well, we've got some dinner ready.”

I look at him puzzled. I know this is a lie. Jerry would never have dinner ready. I want to leap up and hug him, but I remain calm. “Oh,” I say to the sorcerer and his wife, “my captain calls. Guess I'd better go.”

He clasps my hand in his and I anticipate self-immolation. Instead he helps me off the ladder of his boat onto mine. When I land on our deck, I gaze at Jerry. “I thought you might need rescuing,” he says.

“He's a sorcerer,” I tell Tom and Jerry when we finally sit down for a bite. “In his previous life he was a Viking.”