The River Queen (3 page)

We found the
Samantha Jean
moored in a grove of dark trees at the bottom of a slope and I sent Matt ahead on the wobbly dock and called out politely, “Tom? Is Tom Hafner here?”

The boat rattled and water sloshed and soon a huge, forty-something man with a graying beard, bulging biceps, and considerable girth emerged. He seemed to favor one eye, or perhaps it was one ear, more than the other, but the slant of his face gave him a vaguely ominous look. “Howdy,” Tom said, crushing my fingers in his. We sat down and the boat rocked again, then seemed to sink. Small waves hit the sides.

A mosquito bit my ankle as Tom offered us a can of diet Mountain Dew, which we declined. He popped one open as I explained that I wanted to go down the Mississippi River in a houseboat and I was looking for someone to teach me how to pilot. “After I learn how to pilot, I was thinking about renting the boat and doing the trip on my own,” I said.

Guffawing laughter poured out of Tom and shook the boat. “First, you can't do it on your own. Oh you could putter around a little here and there, but you can't go through the locks and dams on your own, and you've got about twenty of those between here and St. Louis. You need a person to steer and at least one other to hold the lines. Really you need two. You can't tie up on your own. How're you going to anchor by yourself? What're you going to do if you find yourself in fog? With a barge coming upstream? You probably don't know how to navigate, do you?”

He took a gulp of diet Dew, crushed the can, grabbed another. “You probably don't even know how to stay on the main channel. And how're you going to sleep on a riverbank alone? I wouldn't let my girlfriend do that. I wouldn't let my dog do that. Basically, forget about doing it on your own.”

I agreed to forget it.

“What you really need,” Tom went on as he popped open his second can of diet Dew, “is someone who wants to move a boat. You don't want to hire an outfitter cuz that's gonna cost you an arm and a leg. You know, fuel downstream and back because they gotta come home. You need to find a person who has a boat and wants to take it south. If I had a boat, I'd take you, but I don't.…”

I looked at the boat we were standing on. “Well, what about this one?”

“Believe me, I wish I could.” He shook his head. “She's not made for travel. Oh, she's fine for around here, but I wouldn't trust her in a storm. What you should do,” Tom said thoughtfully, “is talk to Jerry Nelson. Jerry was one of my first tormentors. He got me into my first boat. I'd trust him with my life. Jerry moves boats, big boats sometimes. You could just go stow away on one. Maybe just stick out your thumb and hitch a ride.”

4

T
HE FIRST
time I was ever on a river was with my father. We had rented a boat on the Fox and my father steered. I was surprised that he knew how to pilot, but it seemed he had lived a different life before I was born, one I would rarely be privy to. My mother had packed a picnic of fried chicken and potato salad. My brother, John, and I were navigating. As we cruised the river, Dad said things like, “Mark seagull on right; mark tree on left.”

We laughed because, of course, we understood even then that you cannot mark seagulls or trees. The seagulls will fly and the trees are everywhere. But we laughed because it was funny. Because my father laughed. We were happy that day, which wasn't always the case.

I hadn't thought about that time on the Fox in years, but it came back to me as Matt and I pulled up to the French Island Yacht Club, where Jerry Nelson moored his boat. The docks were lined with houseboats with colorful awnings and painted trim, screened-in porches, and gas barbecue grills on the back. I admired the window boxes, where plastic flowers bloomed, and the beautifully appointed decks with vinyl furniture, where you could dine as the river drifts by. And they had nifty names like
Shady Lady
or
Martin's Fling,
and, my personal favorite,
Naughty Buoys.

We wandered up and down the wooden planks, shouting for Jerry Nelson. After a few moments a tall and fit sixty-year-old man, pale for someone who spent all his time on the water, appeared on the bow of a houseboat. He wore khaki shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. “Are you Jerry Nelson?” I asked.

“Yes I am.” He had a quizzical smile and just stared at me. I explained that I was a writer and I wanted to take a journey down the Mississippi. “I'm looking for someone who has a boat he wants to move,” I said, parroting what Tom had told me to say. “Someone who could take me down the river.”

“Oh,” Jerry said. “I see.” He stood perfectly still as if he were frozen in space, and Matt and I were motionless beside him. He cocked his head at me in a way that I recognized from my father. I could tell that Jerry, like Tom, was hard of hearing in at least one ear.

I grew up with a deaf man. My father had scarlet fever when he was a boy. Though he could hear music, he often couldn't hear what was being said. Restaurants were particularly difficult. For the first fifteen years of my life, until he had a surgery, he never heard footsteps, the sound of a train's wheels when he rode on it, voices on the telephone. In order to communicate, he shouted. In the end he shouted about many things.

My father was charming, handsome, debonair, and people said he looked like Cary Grant. Greer (as in Greer Garson) and Cary, that's how people referred to my parents. At one time he was considered to be Chicago's most eligible Jewish bachelor. He was very much in demand, a fact that made my mother jealous, not of other women, but of his allure.

But underneath, as my brother and I knew, my father was a very angry man. Seething in ways few could imagine. Street angel, house devil, the Yiddish expression goes. His temper was reserved for those closest to him and limited to peccadilloes, the smallest of things. To lights left on and dishes in the sink. Bread not broken before it was buttered. The offenses varied, but the result was the same.

His anger was never physical. It was only words, but, as I've learned over the years, words can kill. The pitch of his voice would rise. I was always a little afraid of him. We all were. To this day his outbursts are incomprehensible to me. He never apologized. He never acted as if anything was wrong. He'd blow up and call us names, then make us popcorn or take us to play golf, as if nothing had happened.

Now Jerry, with his head cocked the way I'd seen my father's a hundred times, still hadn't moved. I could tell that he was turning something over in his mind. After what seemed like a long while, he said, “Actually, I've got a boat I've been thinking about taking south.”

“You do?” I was stunned.

He nodded. “It's an old houseboat. I want to start wintering in Mississippi on the Tenn-Tom. I've got some friends down in Portage Des Sioux who said I could dock with them over the winter, then I'd move her farther south next spring.”

Jerry paused again and I took this as my cue. “So you have a boat that could make a trip like this?”

“Well, not all the way, but…” He nodded. “Yes, I do.”

“This boat?” I asked, pointing to the one we were standing on. It looked big and roomy with nice curtains and an outdoor grill. Jerry shook his head.

“Nope. Another boat.”

“Oh. Where is this boat? Can I see her?”

Another pause. “Sure,” he said, not moving. “You passed her coming down.”

He pointed to the parking lot, then slowly headed that way. I followed him up to where boats in various states of disrepair sat on trailers in dry dock. I had passed her coming down, but hadn't noticed. That's probably because she wasn't much to look at. The paint was peeling from her hull in strips and it looked as if you could poke holes through the wood. A line of greenish brown muck that reminded me of pudding oozed from her baseboards. The railings were rusted away and smashed-up plastic chairs were piled on the stern. She had a
FOR SALE
sign taped to her back door and scribbled below it in pencil the words
River Queen.

“She's been out of the water awhile,” Jerry offered by way of explanation. Three years in fact, he said as I climbed the rickety ladder onto the deck. The windows were so dirty I couldn't see inside so Jerry popped open the door. It was about 140 degrees in the cabin and the floor was covered with power tools and cardboard boxes filled with junk. Dust and grime coated every available surface. “So what d'ya think?”

I was thinking that I'd seen other houseboats with their window boxes and Weber grills, sun awnings and deck chairs, but my options seemed to be running out. This was truly a wreck of a vessel, but I'd already taken leave of the college where I teach, my family and friends, and, some might add, my senses in order to make this journey in September. I'd squirreled away the money I'd need. If I was to begin in the fall, I had to come up with a plan.

This seemed like a boat I could afford. Definitely within my budget. And she was only going one way. Besides, for whatever reason, perhaps a drug-induced haze, I had a vision of this little ship all white and shiny, carrying me downstream. Somewhere beneath the rust and peeling paint, I thought she had class.

“Will you fix her up? I mean, before our trip?” Jerry looked puzzled as if he wasn't sure what I meant. “You know,” I explained. “Clean her up.”

“Well,” he said. “She could use a paint job. I'll take care of that.”

“And maybe get some … chairs? And, urn”—I gazed at the top deck—“some shade?” He nodded in what I assumed to be agreement. “Would she make it to Memphis?” I asked, trying to hide the skepticism in my voice. She looked as if she wouldn't make it to the first lock and dam.

“Oh, she'll make it. She was built for Lake Michigan where the waves get high. But I'm only going to St. Louis.” The wheels in my head started to turn. I didn't want to have to change boats in St. Louis. I wanted this boat to take me farther south.

“Well, I have to get as far as Memphis … on this leg.” I had decided that I'd go to Memphis, take a break, then finish the trip.

Jerry grumbled. “I don't like the lower Mississippi very much. You ever looked at that part of the river? It can be boring and monotonous. You need to bring a very long book.” This coming from Jerry gave me pause.

I had looked at the lower Mississippi. If you turn the map on its side, it looks like somebody's very agitated EKG. As Mark Twain wrote, the lower Mississippi, which begins at Cairo, Illinois, is the “crookedest” river in the world. You go almost twelve hundred miles while the crow flies six hundred. Often on the lower Mississippi you are traveling as much east and west as north and south. And many of those miles had levees that kept you from seeing much beyond the riverbank itself. “But we'll see,” Jerry said, nodding his head. “Memphis isn't that much farther.”

“Can you go slow?” I asked.

“The only thing I do better than slow,” Jerry said, “is stop.”

5

I
N THE
fall of 1965 when I was applying for college, my mother told me to go east. She said that sometimes in this life an opportunity presents itself and you have to grab it. I know when she said this she was wishing she had. Though I had never had any intention of leaving Illinois, it is what I did. I went east and never looked back.

With AAA maps marked in thick blue Magic Marker, my parents drove me to college. They rode in the front and I spent the entire ride staring at my mother's thick red hair, rolled in a tidy French twist. She was once voted Redhead of the Week at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair. There was so much luggage in the backseat that the customs officials in Windsor didn't know I was there. We went to Niagara Falls and put on yellow rain slickers. I stood with my parents on the ledge behind the falls, water spraying our faces. Then they dropped me off in Boston, and they were gone.

Years later I opened a drawer by my father's bedside table looking for a pen. As I began to rifle through, I came upon hearing-aid batteries, assorted Father's Day and birthday cards, photographs of grandchildren as babies, my brother's college graduation diploma from 1973, a
Life
Magazine from 1962.

Then I found the maps. They were old and folded, salvaged from the glove compartment of a car we hadn't owned in years, but as soon as I saw the thick blue lines, I knew that these were the AAA maps with the route that had been drawn for my father. I followed the arrow up past Lake Erie and Niagara Falls, Buffalo, Albany, and finally Boston, where they dropped me off. Another arrow pointed the way back to Chicago. It followed a southern route, one I never took because I never returned, but my father probably kept them because he believed that one day he'd bring me home.

I thought I'd left the Midwest behind. Though I longed for the flatlands of my youth and wrote about them in my novels and stories, returning wasn't in my mind. The river, like childhood, drifted into memory. Years went by. I moved from Boston to New York. My parents kept waiting for me to return, but I had my reasons, and I suppose they were good ones, for not moving home.

While the Midwest always had an allure, I was rarely back for long. A restlessness grew in me I couldn't squelch and I began to wander the world. I moved to Mexico for a couple of years, then to Rome. I took the Trans-Siberian Railway from Beijing to Berlin. I was known by some to be a drifter, though I had an apartment in Manhattan, sometimes a job, and often a cat.

Then, in the spring of 1993, when I lived in Brooklyn, with a family of my own, I was invited to Kansas City, Missouri, to give a talk. This was not supposed to be a momentous, life-altering experience. Just a visit with an old friend, a day of sightseeing, then Sunday brunch with a book group.

Normally I like an aisle seat, but for some reason this flight was heavily booked and I got a window. I was a little crammed in by a large man sitting beside me who turned out to be Cole Younger's great-great-grandson (of the notorious James-Younger gang). He was president of the Cole Younger Historic Society and talked my ear off about his famous relative and how many people he'd killed and banks he'd robbed.