Old Glory (49 page)

It was Halloween. Grinning pumpkins flickered all the way up Independence Street, and the white shingled houses had witches strung up on their verandas. Trick or Treat had lost its innocence, though. The announcer on the car radio was warning us not to let our children eat Halloween candy before we had carefully examined it. All homemade candies must be thrown away unless given by neighbors personally known to us. We must be on the lookout for hidden razor blades, needles, hypodermic injections of rat poison and L.S.D. A clinic in Texas was offering a free X-ray service tonight so that Hershey bars could be screened for terminal lumps and shadows.
AMERICA—LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT
said the bumper sticker on the Cadillac in front; I hoped its driver was listening to the same wave band on his radio.

Cape Girardeau had, in its own small way, stepped westward like St. Louis. I had driven through the old riverside town. It was ill-lighted and half deserted—a pretty, crumbling honeycomb of dark Victorian brick and wrought-iron trelliswork. Two miles out, just short of the piled earthwork of Highway 55, I hit the Cape Girardeau of the 1970s—a dazzling neon slum of yawning shopping plazas; chain stores, chain burger shacks, chain motor lodges and that thin chain grass with which property developers try to hide the wounds they have made in the ground. It was an all-American anywhere. It looked as if it had itself been bought by mail order from one of the branches of Sears and J. C. Penney that stood back from the road across oceanic carparks. What it lacked in character it made up in grisly electric color. It was as bright and lonely as the moon.

I took a room in a Ramada Inn and listened to the surf of traffic breaking on the shore of the thousand-mile-long highway from Chicago to New Orleans. Grazing the edge of sleep, I heard the road as a river and slid into a dream in which trucks were tows, their shovel
fronts plowing me down. When I woke, the room was spotted with yellow sodium light. My watch said ten, and it took a few moments to work out that this was night, not day. Out, shivering, on a bald plaza, I found an open Pizza Hut. Maybe that woman in St. Louis had been right. It was eating this kind of stuff in this kind of place at this untime of day-in-night and night-in-day that turned one into a rapist, a thief or a man who hid razor blades in chocolate bars on Halloween. It had started to rain. The colors of the neon tubes were running in the window and making a mess which bore a strong resemblance to the surface of my pizza. The eve of the Feast of All Saints.

Would any self-respecting saint check into a Ramada Inn?

I stared out through the streaky glass and tried to see the place with more sympathetic eyes. Someone—an exhausted trucker, perhaps, or a woman with a station wagon full of squalling children—must find it a blessing; but I couldn’t. Why had Cape Girardeau tried to bury its river behind a wall of cement? Why had it left its handsome old town behind and come out to this loud wilderness of acrylic junk?

I saw the waitress watching me. Perhaps she had nailed me as a spiker of children’s candy. I tried to smile and look like an upright citizen. She came across to my table. Her blond hair was pulled back from her face and knotted in a hygienic braid. Her name, the button on her right breast stated, was Linda. She wasn’t really a waitress, she said. She was majoring in Elementary Ed at the University of Southeast Missouri—the sugar-icing college on the hill. Now she was waiting on tables at nights because she was saving up to leave Cape Girardeau; next semester, she was going to Columbia University.

“Why Columbia?”

“Oh, you know. The usual. There was a guy there … but him and me, we split months ago. So. One: people are kind of narrow-minded around here, right? Two: I always promised myself I’d get to see New York. Plus, I love to watch football. Columbia’s football team … they’re something else.”

“It sounds like an exciting move.”

“Yeah. I’m getting to be all psyched up. God, you ought to meet with the kids in my class here. They’re into, like, chewing straw, stuff like that.… Me, I’ve been liberated since junior high. I guess it’s all the books I read. I’m a real big reader.”

“What are you reading at present?”

“Sci-fi. Robert Heinlein?”

“He’s only a name to me.”

“He’s neat.”

I pointed out the window. “You must feel quite at home here: it looks exactly like something from a sci-fi novel.”

Linda took in the lurid illuminated landscape with a blink as quick as the sprung leaves of a camera shutter. “Looks like Cape Girardeau to me. That’s why I’m quitting.”

It took me two hours of quarrying in the Yellow Pages, chasing leads and following up red herrings, to find a Marine Band radio. I made an assignation with the manufacturer’s representative. At four that afternoon, we’d meet in a parking lot outside a farm twenty miles south down the highway. He promised me a crash course in radio operation and said he’d trust my accent and take a check.

In the meantime, I drove to the river to make sure my boat was safe after the shenanigans of Trick or Treat. The houses of the meaner people in town were easily identifiable: crazy foam had been sprayed over their windows, and their garden shrubs were wreathed in toilet paper. The boat was as I had left it. When I arrived at the landing, it was being studied at a distance by Cape Girardeau’s haunted boy. He was leaning against a dented and rusty white pickup, sucking at a can of Miller’s. He had a pale, pubic mustache, and his face was pouchy with a deep no-hoping sullenness. When I joined him, he held out a can of beer.

“Thanks very much.”

“That yours?”

“Yes.”

“Shit. I like to look at boats … you know?”

“Yes.”

The morning was wide and blue; the sheen on the surface of the river might have been a thick coat of Chinese lacquer. A perfect day for moving on.

“When I was a kid,” the boy said, “my uncle, he had a boat. I never did get to riding in it, though. It got took away in a flood.”

He lived with his mother in a shack less than a mile from the river.
Once, floods had nearly carried their house away. He had gone swimming in the Mississippi, fished in it, most days he came here to moon over it, but he had never in his life been on it in a boat.

“Would you like to go out now?”

“I wouldn’t want to be no trouble, mister.”

“I’d like to go myself.”

“Well … if I was to just, kind of, like, string along …” I watched his face. He was trying hard to cover up his excitement.

We walked down the jetty, the boy carrying what was left of his morning six-pack.

“I always wanted to get a start on the towboats. But they’re close. I tried, but there wasn’t no chance. I don’t know. I guess for that you got to have kin on the river.”

Like his counterpart in Chester, he had a part-time job. He worked for a firm of movers, but there was no money in it.

“Ain’t nothin’ to do round Cape, ’cept you have money.”

“What would you do if you did have money?”

“I don’t know. Shows … I guess. Go round the bars …”

I started the motor and we headed upstream, lumbering slowly against the current.

“How far did you get in high school?”

“Ninth grade.” He must have been barely eighteen. He should have been in school still, but his education was years behind him now; a great misty stretch of failure, boredom, unemployment and ill-afforded cans of Miller’s. He sat up in the bow, rigid, not daring to move. I couldn’t tell whether he was frightened or simply entranced. I kept close to the sandy Illinois shore, hunting for patches of dead water where the engine wouldn’t have to fight so hard against the river.

The boy squinted at the water. “I never did see it from out here. It’s
 … beautiful
 … ain’t it?” He used the word timidly; it came from a foreign language and he found it difficult to pronounce.

Then, suddenly, he tumbled into speech.
There
was the beach he’d gone swimming from as a kid. Least, there wasn’t a beach there no more; that too had been took away by a flood.
There
was the rocky point where he’d caught his big catfish. In that eddy there, a friend of his had drowned; and there, where those trees were, a cousin had lived in a frame house before a flood swept it down to the Gulf. The sullenness had dropped out of his face. As he talked, I watched him growing younger; he went back to fourteen, then twelve, then eight, the albino fluff of his mustache looking more ludicrous by the moment.

I turned the boat around. Abruptly, he clouded over. He had remembered.
By the time we reached the jetty, his face was set back to morose, unwilling adulthood. He didn’t thank me for the trip, but just said, “Be seein’ ya” and sloped, hunch-headed, back to his truck and an afternoon life of shouldering other people’s bedsteads and three-piece suites.

Downtown, where I lunched, was long-faced with shadows of former glory. The Hotel Marquette, an extravagant copy of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, had been closed for more than a decade. The old opera house, restored to quaintness, was enjoying a reincarnation, of a sort, as a restaurant. Half the stores in the city were empty and up for sale or rent. The saddest place was the waterfront. One could reach the river through a steel gate in the wall. What had once been the town’s commercial heart, the steamboat landing, was a ruinous site of heaps of stones, broken cobbles and lumps of cement. Two frail old men, a hundred yards apart, squatted in this rubble, smoking pipes and searching the water for whatever images the drifting current could summon. They looked unapproachable. In walking through the gate in the wall they had put society behind them. It was, in any case, a place for old men, and I felt a trespasser there. It didn’t hold any of my memories. I noted that the water shoaled in dangerous humps inshore above the highway bridge; plotted a smoother course, off-channel, on the Illinois side; and left.

My new radio was going to admit me to full membership in the community of the river. It stood on the dressing table, a businesslike and reassuring white slab of dials and little lights. I knew the handbook that came with it by heart. I had practiced switching from Channel 6 to Channel 13. I’d called “Mayday” into the dead microphone. I had only just restrained myself from taking it down to the boat and wiring it up in the dark. It had cost $380; in return, a tight knot of funk had been cleanly excised from my stomach. For a piece of major surgery, the radio was very cheap indeed.

Even the vile shopping plazas didn’t look so bad tonight. The Pizza Hut was full, and the waitresses were moving between tables at the speed of shuttles on a loom; but Linda came over to talk in breathless respites of thirty seconds at a time. She was full of time warps, holes in space and alternative worlds. I was fascinated by her taste in fiction. Out of place in Cape Girardeau, she had made herself thoroughly at home in the more distant of the undiscovered galaxies. She had gutted libraries of the stuff.

“At Columbia,” she said, “I heard you can take courses in it”—and was whited-out into the alternative world of root beer, dough and Parmesan.

Back from her next trip, she pointed at the book on my table. “What’s that you’re reading?”

I showed her. It was the Reverend Timothy Flint’s
Recollections of the Mississippi
.

“Oh,” she said with disappointment. “Just history, huh?”

I had only recently entered Flint’s stretch of the river. In Minneapolis, he had struck me as a comic figure: easily shockable, disaster-prone, worried half to death at the impieties of the frontier. Reading him now, I thought him an admirable realist. His passage on the boils in the current was superbly vivid and exact:

I hadn’t heard the hissing noise. Next time, I’d turn my motor off and listen.

Linda had returned. “When you graduate from Columbia,” I said, “what do you plan to do then? Teach?” I couldn’t quite see her blowing the minds of elementary-school children with tales of interstellar warfare.

“No. I’m fixing to be an airline stewardess. I’d really love to travel.”

Travel
. It was an intransitive verb. It didn’t involve any destinations. It was going for the going’s sake, to be anywhere but where you were, with the motion itself its only object.

“Anywhere in particular?”

“Uh-uh. I don’t know. The East, maybe? Yeah, I reckon I’d like to see the East.”

There was to be no travel for me, though. When I woke, the wind was louder than the traffic on the highway. The newly planted saplings outside my window were bent into shivering loops. The most that I could hope to do was attach the radio to the battery in the boat and practice working it.

Waves sluiced over the floating jetty, and the jetty itself was rocking so tippily that I had to crawl rather than walk along it, carrying only
the aerial of the set. I wasn’t going to let the river take my radio as a votive offering. I had company. A thirty-something-foot sloop had moored alongside me. It didn’t look like the usual run of snow geese; an old wooden boat, its deck festooned with lashed-down bicycles, fuel drums, gas cylinders and chests.
Morning Star
, Chicago.

My own boat was lurching in the swell, and as I tried to fix the aerial to the stern, I kept twisting my screwdriver on empty air.

“Hi. You look as if you could do with some assistance there.”

The owner of
Morning Star
was a scrawny man in his fifties with more eyeglasses than face. He looked as if he would be easier working an adding machine in an insurance office than sitting out a Mississippi storm.

“We just looked over your rig and reckoned there must be some guy around who’s even crazier than we are.”