On the River Styx (21 page)

In his own lifetime—is this really true?—the river has changed from blue to a dead gray-brown, so thickened with inorganic silt that a boy would not see his own feet in the shallows. The real-estate agent, not a local man but full of local lore, asserts that the Atlantic salmon have vanished from the Hudson, and that the striped bass and shad are so contaminated by the poisons dumped into these waters by the corporations that people are prohibited from eating them. Only the blacks, says he, come out to fish for them, prowling the no-man’s-land of tracks and cinders.

A grit beach between concrete slabs of an old embankment is scattered with worn tires. He wonders, as his father had, at the sheer number of these tires, brought by forces unknown so very far from the roads and highways and dumped in low woods and spoiled sullen waters all across America, as if, in the ruined wake of the course of empire, the tires had spun away in millions down the highways and rolled off the bridges into the rivers and down into deep swamps of their own accord.

But the horizon is oblivious, the clouds are white, the world rolls on. Under the cliffs, the bend is yellow in the glow of maples, and the faraway water, reflecting the autumn sky, is gold and blue. Soiled though they are, the shining woods and glinting water and the bright steel tracks, the high golden cliffs across the river, seem far more welcoming than the valley slope above, with its tight driveways, smelly cars, vigilant houses.

For a long time, by the riverside, he sits on a drift log worn smooth by the flood, withdrawn into the dream of Henry Hudson’s clear blue river, of that old America off
to the north toward the primeval mountains, off to the west under the shining sky.

T
HE REAL-ESTATE AGENT
has persuaded him to come to dinner, to celebrate his move into the cottage, and a van has delivered a large crate containing what is left of the family things. On a journey home after his father’s death, he had got rid of everything else, glad to have Arcadia behind him. But when his years in Africa were ended, and he was faced with a return to the United States, where he knew no one, this crate, in his imagination, had overflowed with almost everything from childhood. However, all he finds are a few small antiques that could not be sold quickly yet had seemed too valuable to abandon. There are also a few unaccountable small scraps—a baby-blue bathroom rug with faded bears, the Peter Rabbit book, the photograph of his duel with the Great Dane Inga.

His grandmother’s riverscape is jammed in carelessly, its gold frame chipped. Wrapped around his father’s Hardy reels and .410 Purdy shotgun is the Assistant Secretary’s worn-out hunting jacket, the silver brandy flask still in the pocket, the hard brown canvas and scuffed corduroy irrevocably stained with gun oil, bird blood, and the drool of setter dogs.

The riverscape is hung over the mantel, with the Purdy on oak dowel pins beneath. He likes the feel of the quick gun, with its walnut stock and blue-black finish, its fine chasing. He will keep it loaded, as a precaution against looters and marauders. Agent Ed has advised him to emulate the plump homes of his neighbors, which are walleyed with burglar lights, atremble with alarms.

However, he hates all that night glare, he feels less protected than exposed. As soon as his pistol permit is restored—he concocts this plan over his evening whiskeys—he’ll use a silencer to extinguish every burglar light in the whole neighborhood.

Why scare off marauders, he asks the agent’s wife at supper, when the death of one burglar at the hands of a private citizen would do more to prevent crime than all the floodlights in Westchester County? He has said this for fun, to alarm this upstate couple. Poor Ed loves this dangerous talk, having no idea that his guest means it, and as for the hostess, the woman is agog, her eyes loom huge and round behind her spectacles.

“You’re such a … well, a
disturbing
man!” she says.

“Disturbed
me
from the very first day I met him!” Ed cries jovially to soften his wife’s inadvertent candor. “I suppose you’re waiting for a new foreign service job?”

“There won’t be one,” he says abruptly, as if admitting this to himself for the first time.

He drinks the whiskey he has carried to the table. That these folks want a Harkness for a friend is all too plain. He picks up the wine, sips it, blinks, pulls his head back from it, sets his glass down again. “A bit sweet,” he explains, when her stare questions him.

Ed jars the table and his face goes red with a resentment that he has avoided showing until now. “Well, shit,” he says. “You’re a damn snob,” he says.

“Oh my.” The woman does not take her round eyes off their guest.

Ed scrapes his chair back and goes to the front door and opens it. “We just thought you might be kind of lonely,” Mrs. Ed mourns.

“Probably likes it that way,” the agent says.

Things are awry again. Afraid of something, he takes a large swallow of wine and nods approvingly. “Not bad at all,” he says, with a poor smile.

“It’s not just the wine,” the agent warns his wife. The woman has crossed her bare arms on her chest in the cold draft that wanders through the opened door.

“I was hoping you’d call me Henry,” he says, drinking more wine. “Very nice,” he says. She turns her face away, as if unable to look upon his desperation. “Forgive me,” he says.

“Nosir,” the voice says from the door. “Nosir, I don’t think we will.”

N
OT WANTING HIS NEW HOUSE
to be finished, leaving things undone, he takes long walks along suburban roads and drives. People stare to let him know they have their eye on him. Bad dogs run out. Even so, the walks are dull and pointless. More and more often he returns to the low river woods, the endless iron stretch of tracks, the silent river, flickered over by migrating swallows.

One day in October, he crosses the tracks and sits on a dock piling with twisted bolts, wrenched free by some upriver devastation. The piling’s faint creosote smell brings back some childhood boat excursion, upriver through the locks of Lake Champlain.

The breeze is out of the northwest, and has an edge to it. With a fire-blackened scrap of siding, he scrapes out a shelter under the old pilings, partly hidden from the woods by the pale sumac saplings that struggle upward from the cinders.

In the early autumn afternoon, out of the wind, he is warmed by the westering sun across the river. If the beach litter were piled in front of him, he thinks, he would be unseen even from the water. Not that there is anyone to see him, it is just the sheltered feeling it would give him. The freighters headed up to Albany, the tugs and barges, an occasional fat white motor cruiser with its nylon Old Glory flying from the stern, pass too far offshore to be aware of a hat-shadowed face in a pile of flotsam.

He hunches down a little, squinting out between his knees.

He is safe and secret, sheltered from the world, just as he had been long ago in his tree houses and attic hideouts, in the spruce hollow in the corner behind the lode of packages under the Christmas tree, in warm nests in the high summer grass, peeping out at the Algonkin Indians.
Delawares
, his father said.
Algonkin is the language family
. In the daytime, at least, no one comes along the tracks. He has the river kingdom to himself. As to whether he is content, he does not know.

He has packed dry sherry in his father’s silver flask, a sandwich, a hard apple, and also a new bleeding-heart account of modern politics in the former Belgian Congo. His name receives harsh passing mention. He thinks, To hell with it. I did what was asked of me. I did my duty. Having the courage to dirty one’s hands, without glory and at great risk of ingratitude, may become one’s higher duty to one’s country, wasn’t that true?

The trouble was, he had not liked Lumumba. He had wondered if the Prime Minister might be unstable. Lumumba’s hostility toward Europeans flared and shuddered like a fire in the wind but never died. He ate distractedly in small brief fits, growing thinner and thinner. He was
moody, loud, self-contradictory, he smoked too much hemp, he drank a lot, he took one woman after another despite his devotion to his wife, he could not stop talking or stand still.

W
ILD DUCKS PASS BY
within gun range, flaring away from his little cove with hard quacks of alarm. He swings his arms as if holding a gun, and they crumple and fall in a downward arc as he follows through. Watching them fly onward, he feels an exhilaration tinged with loss that wild fowl still tried to migrate south along this shore of poisoned mud and rust and cinders. On a northeast wind, in rain, his hiding place would serve well as a duck blind, for in order to land into the wind the birds would hook around over the open water and come straight in to the gun.

More ducks appear farther upriver where the black stumps of an old dock jut from the surface. The long rust heads and silver-white bodies are magically unsullied in the somber water. There are five.

N
EEDING SOMETHING
to look forward to, he decides upon a sacramental hunt. A hunter’s stiff whiskey by the fire, the wild-duck supper with wild rice, the red Bordeaux from his mother’s old colonial crystal decanter—thus will he consecrate the return of the Harkness family to Arcadia. Since it will happen only once, he can’t be bothered with decoys, waders, far less a retriever. The river is too swift and deep to wade in, and in the unlikely event that a duck falls, the current is bound to carry it ashore.

To acquire a license to kill ducks he goes to Yonkers, not wishing to excite local curiosity. It seems absurd to bother about a license for one bird, when to shoot on the railroad right-of-way will be illegal in the first place. He applies for
the permit for the same reason that he would feel obliged to retrieve and eat any bird he shot, rather than waste it. His father had been strict about licenses, bag limits, and using what one killed, even in the days when ducks were plentiful. To offend this code would violate the hunt ceremony in some way, make the supper pointless.

He has no proof of U.S. residence in the previous year—in the previous two decades, if it comes to that. He does not say this lest his very citizenship be challenged by the hostile young black woman, who says he will have to identify himself, submit proof of residence, proof of citizenship. But he has no driver’s license or certificate of birth, and can’t tell her that his passport has been confiscated.

“Next!”

As for the huge hunting license, it looks nothing like the duck-stamp badge his father had worn upon his fishing hat. The new license is worn on the back, to facilitate identification by the game warden. Though he knows it is foolish, he feels he is being tricked into the open. One might as well wear a bull’s-eye on one’s back.

“Next!”

Are the authorities suggesting, he inquires, that the duck hunter is stupid as well as lawless, that he will shoot over his limit and make off with his booty, yet neglect to remove this grotesque placard from his back?

“We ain’t suggesting nothing. That’s the law.” She waves him aside.

It disconcerts him that the hunter behind him in the line is black.

“Move along please! Next!”

While stalling, he folds a twenty-dollar bill into his application form and eases it back across the counter, at the same time requesting her to be more careful how she
speaks to him. Raising her eyebrows at his tone, then at the money, she heaves around as if to summon her superior, giving him a chance to withdraw the bill. He does so quickly, winking at the black hunter, asking this female if he really requires proof that he is an American—doesn’t he look like one?

With the back of her hand, she brushes away his application form, which flutters to the floor.

“I could bust you, mister. You just watch your step.”

She is already processing the next application.

“
Everybody
looks American,” she is saying. “
I
look American. And you know what, mister?” She looks up at him. “I
am
American. More than you.” She points at the incomplete form in his hand. “I ain’t lived in Africa for half my life.”

Please do not confuse your activities in Africa with the foreign service, far less true service to your country, less still an honorable career that would make you a credit to this family
.

When he raised his eyes, his mother averted hers. He flipped his father’s note back at her, in a kind of spasm. The letter struck her at the collarbone and fell into her lap. She looked down at it for a long moment, then picked it up between two fingers and set it on the table. Her eyes glistened.

You’ve changed so, Henry, dear. When you went off to war, you grew so hard. It wasn’t your fault, of course. Seeing all those dreadful things—it’s enough to confuse
anyone,
I’m sure!

Before he could protest, she had slipped away from him.

You were such a lonely boy. How I wish you’d found somebody. Or become a naturalist!
she added brightly.
Animals are so much easier, aren’t they?

Inappropriately, she tried to smile, as if to soothe him.

We shall always love you, dear
.

His rivals killed him!
he insisted.
Mother?
He had wanted to seize her, to shake from her frail body some pledge of loyalty.
Patrice was the Soviets’ little macaque!

She opened her eyes wide in mock astonishment—
Patrice?

And your little Mr. Mobutu, dear? The dictator? Whose macaque is he?

H
E DECIDES
he will need decoys after all. His father’s hand-carved balsa ducks, close-etched with wild colors, had been rigged with cedar keels and fine-smelling tarred cod line and square lead anchors on which the line was wrapped, leaving just enough room in the open center so that line and weight fitted neatly over bill and head. But sturdy wood decoys are no longer available, or not, at least, in these seedy river towns.

What are offered instead are swollen plastic mallards, drake mallards only, with heads the dead green of zinc alloy and the rest a bad industrial brown fit to attract those mongrel ducks that inhabited the dirty waters of the city parks and the pilings of old river docks in Yonkers. By means of gaudy plastic twine that would cut the hands in winter weather, each duck is rigged to a scrap of pig iron, sure to drag in any sort of wind.