Old Glory (11 page)

I wound through a string of narrow islands, following the lines of buoys. The path was puzzling. It kept on going straight in to the shore and opening onto another stretch of river whose existence had been a well-kept secret behind a false wall of tamarack and swamp oak. Blunt-nosed tows came foraging out from what I’d thought unbroken forest, and I learned to look for their giveaway inverted commas of diesel smoke tethered above the treetops.

The bluffs widened, and the Mississippi spread itself into a great islanded pool, two miles from shore to shore. It was Boulanger Slough. Two nights before, sitting in the restaurant in Minneapolis, I had crossed it on the charts as casually as if I’d been planning a country stroll. Boulanger Slough in life, though, looked horribly different from Boulanger Slough on paper.

So this was what a stump field was: a barbered forest. For as far as one could see, the rotten tree trunks stood up, some just below, some a few inches above the water. It had been, perhaps, a hundred years since they’d been cut down, and they looked as if they were already halfway
to being coal. The river slurped around their blackened roots and boles. The channel here swung out and east through this waste of water, bog and timber. The wind was bowling long gusts from the right-hand shore, where it began as a riffle on the edge of the stump field, then built up a rolling swell as it came north across the mile or so of peaty water.

By the time it reached me, it had accumulated a frightening height and weight: lines of chocolate combers ran straight up and down the channel. They took hold of the boat and rocked it over on its gunwales. I had to find a diagonal course into the rollers, and kept on trying to tack against the grain of the wind. Black to red and red to black … but the buoys were mostly hidden by the high waves. Suddenly lifted on a crest, I’d see them, then get pitched down again into the slop. Riding a wave top for a moment, I looked for the two shores. They were both getting farther away. Had I been the Reverend Timothy Flint, I would have rushed for my copy of
The Navigator;
but that was packed deep in my suitcase far up in the bow, with rivulets of Mississippi water dribbling all over its scuffed leather.
Think slow
. One wave at a time.

Turning the boat’s head at the end of each tack was my main problem. As I got closer and closer to the lines of rotten stumps, I had to wait for a wider-than-average trough, then spin around and head back up into the wave from which I’d just dropped down. Once, when I seesawed ineptly over a breaker, the propeller was lifted clear of the water and the engine made a vile sound, like the squeal of a stuck pig.

“You don’t have to do
nothing
fast.”

“Respect her, or she’ll do you in …”

Wave followed on black wave in a monotonous, lilting rhythm. There were some words that went with it, somewhere … and suddenly they came back to me. A British manufacturer of tonic and mineral waters supplies a lot of English pubs with ashtrays to advertise his products. The words go in a continuous circle around the rim:

Thank God for Mr. Rawlings. His jingle revolved obsessively in my head like a loop of recording tape. I set it to the waves:

I quite lost count of all the foreign climes and moments quite appalling; I also lost my fright. I didn’t notice that I was gaining the lee shore of a fringe of islands until I was there, and the water was quiet, and there was suddenly time on my hands under sunny skies at sixty-eight degrees.

Bluffs closed in on the river again, and it dawdled through deep woody pools. On the holiday houseboats moored offshore, parties of women played euchre while their husbands took off in skiffs for the riverside bars, where they roistered dutifully through the long afternoon.

“Trouble with folks around here,” said the man at Diamond Bluff, “is we don’t have no fun at all! No one has any fun here—ain’t that right, you guys? No one’s having fun! Look at these guys here—not one of them’s having fun!” He laughed, and dribbled Budweiser, his face smashed with liquor. “Say, do we look as if we’re having fun here?”

“Not very much.” It was true. The shaky, aging funsters with their whoops and hollers looked as if they’d been condemned to having a good time. They were serving out their sentences as old cons do, with practiced resignation. The man, though, mistook my answer for companionable irony.

“
Not much!
Hey, Clyde—give this fellow another goddamn drink. Can you believe it? You come out to Diamond Bluff any Saturday, and you’ll find it just exactly the same. Eggs-ackly. Do you have fun in England the same way we have fun here? Betcha don’t have no place there like Diamond Bluff! You just take a look at us guys: nobody …” His voice wobbled into a hiccup. “… has fun like we do.” He caught his foot in the brass rail at the bottom of the bar and fell against me, scattering my half-eaten pizza to the floor.

I went chugging out past the knot of houseboats. The women, waiting for their sodden menfolk, were eking out the hours with ice cream, brownies, chocolate-chips and cards. Their cracked tenor voices rattled over the water:

“Pass.”

“Pass.”

“Left bower.”

“Right bower.”

“Euchred!”

Below Diamond Bluff, the river slid by an Indian reservation, posted against trespassers. Curious, I ran my boat into a quiet creek off the main channel. Herons lumbered off their fishing stations on creaky wings and the forest glades were speckled with butterflies, but the Indians were away and somewhere else. The burned-out chassis of a car caught high up in the branches of a tree was the only sign that people ever came near this place. I wondered if I was being watched. Turning my motor off, I drifted in the slack water, listening. All I could hear was the crickets, rattling in the brushwood like pocketfuls of chinked nickels, and the plop-plop of baby turtles falling off logs.

The air had gone dead. The boat hung torpidly on the trickle of current that fed Sturgeon Lake. My pipe crackled. I wasn’t sure if I was on forbidden territory. The chart said
LANDS RESERVED FOR USE BY INDIANS
, but made no mention of the water. Still, I felt like an out-of-season hunter. Posted and reserved, the Prairie Island Indians had become just one more endangered species, like the brown bear and the bald eagle. There was another wrecked car stuck in another tree; and where the creek opened into the lake, a row of plastic detergent bottles marked a fishnet or a line of baited hooks. So the Indians must have been about. I tried calling “Hello!” into the woods, but the only response came from a pair of snipe that fireworked out of a brake of fallen timber.

I started the motor again, and flushed a complete Audubon of pigeons and waterfowl. They went cackling and flapping overhead. Angry
American
birds. Bigger, gaudier and more numerous than their British relatives, they made me feel even more of a trespasser as they clattered back onto the water, grumbling like wives at the unmannerly way I had intruded upon their afternoon.

I continued downriver, the shadow of the boat running ahead of me as the Mississippi took a dogleg eastward, then dropped sharply south into Red Wing. The bluff on which the town was built was almost black now; it was hard to tell which was which between the pines and the church spires. I nosed around a floating village of boathouses moored to gin poles; they moaned and rumbled on the wake I made, their tin roofs catching the remains of the sun like heliographs.

An off-channel lagoon had a little colony of houseboats tucked inside it, and I went cruising around other people’s patios, looking for a space to tie up. All over the lagoon, the electric storm lanterns were being set out with the barbecue furniture, cocktail cabinets were opening, and the serious business of partying was getting under way. The houseboats were bright with lights and voices; their owners stood in identical leisure wear, caught in the same pose with a cocktail shaker in one hand
and a bottle of bourbon in the other, welcoming their guests to a world which, just for this moment, had the stylized brilliance of a TV commercial.

I was taken in hand and invited to come partying. My boat was made fast for me with fancy nautical knots (“You know the double sheet bend? I swear by it”), and I was shown onto the veranda of the biggest and newest houseboat in the row.

“This is Dick and Alma and Walter and Betty and Don and Bonnie and Ruby and Jay …”

“Think of the achievement!” Walter was saying. “Just think of the achievement!”

“Thirty-six hours he’s gone,” said Bonnie. “Thirty-six hours!”

“My God, I wish I had his self-control,” said Alma.

“Feels like
weeks,”
Walter said. He was a big man with sad-sack eyes. He looked as if running for martyrdom were the nicest thing that had happened to him for ages.

“Two
hours,”
Alma said. “That’s my top limit.”

“Thirty-six hours without one cigarette,” moaned Walter. “Hell, gimme a drink, will you, Tom—
gimme
a drink?”

They were all in their fifties, just old enough to be young grandparents. Their children were out of college and had fled Red Wing for faraway jobs out of state, in Colorado, Washington, Florida, Chicago. Everyone had a wallet full of creased photos. The wives carried their sons’ and daughters’ last letters home in their handbags, as if their children had gone off to some foreign war.

“I got a line from Cathy just this morning.”

“Pete called up from Washington last week. They’re just fine.”

“Gerry says he might come home Thanksgiving.”

These absent children were the real stars of the party. Red Wing was not a place where children stayed if they could get out. Once, like Pig’s Eye, it had looked forward to a future as a metropolis. When President Hayes visited the town in the 1870s, drumming up votes for one of America’s wobblier administrations, he had been able to talk of

It sounds as if even then he was stretching things a little. The sentence bristles with qualifications, as if Hayes feared that there might be a reporter or two from Minneapolis or St. Paul in his audience. Even so, Red Wing then had been thinking big, and by the standards of the time its hopes for itself were not particularly grandiose or unrealistic. Now
the joys of living in Red Wing were being thrust on me as if I might be in a position to whip out an American Express card and buy the joint.

“You seen the St. James Hotel?” Don asked.

“That’s just great,” said Alma. “Oh, you’ll
love
it.”

“They’ve restored it. Hell, they’ve done a real fine job there. A four-poster in every room … all the rooms named after different old-time steamboats … it’s a piece of living history now, the old St. James.”

“Did you know the inventor of puffed wheat was a Red Wing man?”

“No.”

“Not many do. That’s a fact. The guy who invented puffed wheat … Anderson. They named the park after him. Anderson Park. He was born and raised in Red Wing.”

I thought of Pete in Washington and Gerry in Florida and Cathy in Chicago. I felt that I could see their point.

I saw a crucifixion look in Walter’s eyes as I switched from my corncob to a rather damp and crumpled pack of cigarettes. He followed every movement of my Zippo, and his own lips pursed very slightly as I lit up.

“That’s one helluva bag you’re carrying in that boat,” he said. “If you’re going up to the St. James, you’ll need a ride. I can run you up there easy.”

“That’d be very kind of you,” I said, but I was making friends with Dick and Alma, the doctor and his wife. They seemed to have come together on the principle of opposites’ making perfect wholes. Dr. Yang and Mrs. Yin. Dick was a slender, gray ascetic. He paused for several seconds before speaking, and then delivered one-clause sentences of ten words at most. Alma babbled. Her voice sounded as if she gargled regularly with Brillo pads. Her shape was basically circular. Dick occasionally moistened his upper lip from a glass of mineral water; Alma drank tumblers of neat bourbon, and lit each new Kool from the glowing tip of her last one.

Alma wanted me to see their boat, which was moored next door across a companionway.

“Come on, Dick!”

Dick came, with a slight, apologetic, silent bow to the rest of the party.

The entrance to
Mississalma
was flanked by two squat plaster baseball batters, gloriously painted—the Red Wing equivalent of Florentine
putti
. Alma rather than Dick, I thought. Inside, it was more house than boat, a rich apartment of leather, teak and glass. Its long picture windows filled it with the violet glow of dusk. On the water beyond, the lights from the storm lanterns were stars on an ebony sky. Alma
led me through to her galley. Over the lintel she had fixed up a large metal plaque saying
SLAVE QUARTERS
. “The slave quarters,” she said. “Dick!”

Dick had been reading a paper under a tassel-fringed lamp. He dropped it fast. “Yes, dear?”

“Take him up to your wheelhouse. Show him the radios.”

Dick took his usual time to think. He looked as if he were silently counting his own heartbeats. “Maybe he’s not interested in that kind of thing.”

“Of course he’s interested. He’s going down the river.”