Atlantis: Three Tales (12 page)

Ahead, the bridge spilled out onto macadam that ribboned through the land—land not terribly different from what he'd left in Carolina. He could see a couple of churches. There was a cluster of white frame houses you might even call a township; and two, four, or twelve miles further along the road (he knew) there'd be another. But the bridge here, he realized, connected the city to the country. And country was what Sam thought he'd left behind.

For the first time in months, he remembered the white woman on the train—Scottish—who'd been so eager to talk . . . who
lived
in the heart of all that. Brooklyn? Her gregariousness had made him uncomfortable. This sudden view of the place she lived—gregarious in its own way, with all he realized now he knew of it—made him as uneasy as she had.

Turning, and expansion into little draughts, he started back for the stanchion steps.

Then, across the railing, beyond the trolley wires, down on the water he saw the boat—the green dinghy. The reply wakens easily, darting from untruth to willed moment. This much closer to shore, the bridge had imperceptibly lowered, till it was only a third as high above the greeny river as it had been in the
center. That was why it took him an eye's blink, a heart's beat, to recognize it. It seemed much larger—the tiny thing—turning slowly, moving out from the rail's edge. But, yes, there was the yellow hat, still on the back seat. Something dark trailed from the side into the water—a leg of the doffed trousers?

Now, maybe twenty feet away, an oar floated out, making the same turns as the boat, moments back, following the same current. Sam frowned, then walked to the rail, to gaze across the traffic lanes a dozen feet below.

No, the boat was empty.

He could see the braces across its bottom. He strained to see the pants, the hat—one oar docked inside, the other loose and floating. He watched a long time. It took the boat almost two minutes to do a complete, lazy, long rotation. And he watched it do two, then three, while he scanned the water, first near it, then further away, for the sunburned arms and shoulders cutting through (swimming strongly), black hair thrown back, glistening, breaking the ripples . . . 

He saw nothing.

I
should
have looked again, Sam thought, returns the full echo of what you meant. In the middle of the bridge, after I ran into that fellow, I should have—though, he pondered a moment later, what good might I have done him even if I
had
seen him from up here dive, fall, or, heaven forbid, jump? Whom could I have called? It would take me half an hour to get to the shore, even from here—to find someone about with a boat, much less get out in the water to help him.

No, there were no ripples from the vanished rower, no fugitive swimmer to be seen. Sam looked about. Had anyone else seen it—or seen more of it?

Had it been a young man? Or an old?
Was
it a white man? Or a black? (He remembered the sailor hawking over the bridge rail.) Was it some blue-eyed Larry just out of Kansas, younger than Hubert if older than he, voyage balked on his first brush with the ocean—but how could you tell? (It had all been so far away!) Had it been some cement-handed old salt, with a shark's tooth round his neck, an aged, fierce old man, a battered, wrecked enigma, mind and language shattered by a lifetime's collision with the sea?

Was it the disillusion of age or youth the river had just drunk up?

The past, Sam thought. The past, the past. The past—

The boat turned, looking now as though it would miss the rocks along the farmland's edge—by a hundred feet! And he could no longer see into it.

Frowning, Sam put his hands into his trousers pockets and started back, scarcely called into being. At the top of the steps, when he'd left the stanchion to walk toward the bridge's center, once he looked down again, to see green water flash its coherent, sunny surface through the gaps at his feet—and the bridge's shadow cut away light, with nothing left over. (Had it moved, even in ten or fifteen minutes? From that circumference now alight with ex-possibilities?) Yes, he passed two women and, yes, one of them pushed a stroller, with a fringed parasol built out to cover it—so that certainly it contained some minuscule creature, mittened and bunted against cool May, to make its mother proud. Become present fact, and you must wear them like clothing. But in the anxiety he walked with now, they just didn't compensate.

Above hung the stone and steel harp, moving in the shadow of your single and twin existence.

A third of the way back, waking in intact appreciation of it, Sam stopped to sit on one of the benches and gaze off at the clouds over Brooklyn. Sputum, urine, feces:
before it swells, the way a waterfall drums at different levels, at least he should find a policeman and tell him what had happened. He even got up, thinking to start again for the nearer, Brooklyn shore. But as he stood, he realized the one thing he would never find—among those fields and farmhouses—was a policeman.

Policemen were in cities.

Sam sat again. Certainly boat, hat, and the man's odd unconcern about his nakedness seemed connected, in Sam's mind, with the more rural—

“Excuse me,” someone said behind him. “But you're Negro, aren't you?”

The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity.

—PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
,
Adonaïs

 . . . plough through thrashing glister toward
fata morgana's lucent melting shore,
weave toward New World littorals that are
mirage and myth and actual shore.

—
ROBERT HAYDEN
, “Middle Passage”

Sam turned on the bench, to see, standing behind him, the man he'd bumped when he'd been staring through the planks.

“Yes,” Sam said. “That's right. I am.”

“I know it's none of my business,” the man said. “But I'd bet a lot of people meet you and think you're white.”

Well, a lot of people up here did. “Some of them.”

“The reason I suspected, I suppose, is that I have a colored friend—a writer. A marvelous writer. He writes stories, but they're much more like poems. You read them, and you can just
see
the sunlight on the
fields and hear the sound of the Negro girls' laughter. His name is Jean—”