The Coldest Night (21 page)

He knelt and wiped at his eyes. His jaw throbbed and he felt the skin on his back pinch and flexed his shoulders as if bee stung. For all that he’d endured he feared for what he might find, his face so damaged. Did she still love him and was there any love left inside him? He decided he was better off not knowing the answer.

The captain bounced echoes off the shore and then gave three quick blasts on the whistle. A great fish rose and splashed in the invisibility. Henry cocked his head and cupped a hand to his ear. He listened intently while cold water pearled on his skin and clothes and he gritted his teeth to hold off a shiver that threatened to rack his body. They passed through the roused smell of waste and discharge and then the air cleared.

“Can you hear anything,” the captain yelled down.

“Nothing but a barking dog.”

“You come on back.”

Henry climbed to the wheelhouse and took up the jar of coffee. He held it for the chill in his hands and arms. Shaking, he lit a cigarette and pulled tight the collar of his jacket. Alternately, he blew hot air into his cupped hands and trod in place. He coughed and thought the best thing about the cold was that you felt nothing.

“You scared?” the captain said.

“Just cold. My tolerance isn’t up to what it used to be.”

“You know when to get scared?”

“When?”

“When you see me get scared. We’re all right now.”

“How do you know?”

“I know that dog.”

He hadn’t been scared in the least and wondered if that was a sign and how was it to be read. The past was coming and soon he would descend into its whelm.

They could see a black stream of river running below and the captain asked him to go forward again and look under the fog as it was beginning to lift. Henry moved up to the bow and went down on his knees. He tucked in his chin and clasped his hands to his chest. His hands ached in the cold dampness and he could not straighten his fingers for how many times they’d been frozen. One by one he could see lights coming on underneath the fog as if they’d once been extinguished and were now electrified. Where the shore met the river came a clear line, the black water meeting the black land, rusty coal barges bleeding into the flow and beneath him the phosphorescent bow wave.

He held a hand to the side of his face as a surge of pain traveled his jawline. It passed and he spit a mouthful of blood into the river. There was a tang in the air and his sweat cooled to his skin and his mouth became sweet and dry and tannic.

Each time he closed his eyes he saw her face.

He dragged a sleeve across his wet face, but soon enough it wetted again. The river was black and the tank lights, tiny pinholes in the darkness, seemed miles away, though he knew he could kick off his boots and swim to shore if he had to. It was that close, that deceptive on the river.

He stayed like that, ducked under the fog, and hand signaled to the starboard.

The
Jean Carol
moved ahead, turning slowly to port from propeller torque, and then the rudder took effect and she started to swing smartly into the main channel and deeper water. Henry stayed on his knees, on watch, as the fog lifted above the sight line of the wheelhouse and even then did not climb back up the ladder to the wheelhouse until the captain yelled down to him that he could see and the river was his again.

“I never had children,” the captain said as Henry shucked the water from his coat.

“Me neither.”

“I had reasons, though.”

“What makes you think I don’t?”

The captain paused, as if realizing the truth of the story he’d gotten himself into and was trying to decide whether to go on or not. Clearly, it was a story he did not like to tell.

“My first time across,” the captain said.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

“It’s all right. It was a long ways back ago. Though time as a healer is much overrated.”

The lifting fog left a new world framed in the window glass where the shore lights cut the darkness more sharply than before and the sound returned and what had been cold became warm.

“My first time across,” the captain said, “we were to put in at Shanghai and from there we moved up the river. It was a dirty river and I started seeing tiny bodies swolled up and floating in its water. The bosun told me they were little girls for the most and not so wanted as little boys in that place and how in time I would get used to it.”

Henry carried such shadows in his own mind, the after-images burned deep in his retinas and Henry thought to tell him so but did not see any reason in it. He felt the gnaw of hunger and lit a cigarette. The captain apologized to him for the story he had told. Henry told him it was all right, but the captain insisted that he had taken liberties with their friendship and it was a story he shouldn’t ought to have told.

“It’s all right,” Henry said. “No apology is necessary.”

“It won’t be long now,” the captain said. “You can go and get your tooth hole looked at.”

“The dog,” Henry said.

“What about it?”

“What if the barking dog back there were sick or died?”

“We’d be in trouble, then, wouldn’t we?”

Then came a fierce belt of dense rain that flattened the river, but it passed too quickly to be of concern and with its passing, the thump in the engine room seemed to diminish as if the bearing and crankshaft had scraped in on their own. The night remained bleak and leaden thereafter, but they could glimpse stars and the night continued warming and seemed less dangerous.

“He used to have children,” the captain said.

“What happened?”

“They drowned. Them and his wife. She was real pretty and so were the children. Like angels, they were. It was a very sad event to have happened.”

“That’s got to do with the bird?”

“The bird was hers.”

“She taught it to speak?”

“You wouldn’t think it could be so, but it sounds just like her. It says everything she used to say and the two of them have regular conversations together.”

“I don’t know if I could live that way.”

“You wouldn’t have a choice now, would you.”

“No, I don’t suppose you would,” Henry said.

“If you ask me my opinion,” the captain said, “love is the foremost disease of the chest.”

The night was now quiet. In moonlight the river shone like brass. The ceiling was still low and there was a thin horizon.

He looked back. Left behind were the deads and yet death still followed him. The thought was real and natural and unshakable as nature itself. There was nothing that mattered to him. There was nothing he needed. He would live on what remained.

As they neared the city, the mountains became backlit and then they rounded a wide bend and there was a long reach and they could see the city lights reflected in the weather. As they approached the outskirts of the city, they passed the walls of low-slung sulfurous factories, their corrugated walls bleeding long trails of rust into the ground. They passed the black hulks of boxcars on sidings and the sunken hulls of blistered scows, great mounds of slack coal leeching into the river. In pockets, the smell of the river burned their nostrils and streets could be seen and there was silent traffic stopped at the intersections. They passed under the steel stanchions of a bridge and then another, and under the second there was fire inside a square of cinder blocks. An iron tripod held a soot-streaked kettle suspended over the fire that flashed and shined with darting yellow light. Cats’ eyes glinted in the weeds. Black silhouettes moved in the fire’s glow, an encampment of paupers. A skiff had been pushed onto the concrete apron and descending from a girder were stringers of great gutted catfish. One of the men came down to where the scum and bubbles marked the water line and urinated.

“It won’t be long,” the captain said. “You’ll be home soon.”

“What about you?” Henry said.

“I’ll deliver this old scow to salvage and then there’ll be something else. There always is.”

“I want to thank you for the ride.”

“Anytime, son. It has been my pleasure. Without you, I will always be a little short-handed from now on.”

“I feel like this is something I have to do.”

“I understand,” the captain said, saluting him and without pause, Henry returned the salute.

The captain took Henry’s hands in his own and held them in the lap of his palms. He held them over the glowing compass. He cocked his head and stared into their hands, the workings of his mind writ on his troubled face. He was to say something, but then he changed his mind and gave back to Henry his hands. He took the wheel again and nothing more was said.

As the
Jean Carol
made her approach to the dock, Henry descended from the wheelhouse and took up the forward spring line.

The captain came in at an angle, stopped the engine, and then bore off. When close, he backed her engine and Henry put out the spring line. The captain worked her ahead until the
Jean Carol
was alongside the dock. Propeller wash drove down between her hull and the dock and pushed her away from the face.

Henry tossed off his seabag and stepped down after it. His legs went weak for the draw of the solid, unmoving concrete. The captain yelled down from the wheelhouse and Henry waved without looking back. He looked down the river, the boathouse where she might be. He looked to the sky. For the long way east the signal star had guided him home. He shouldered his seabag and passed into the streets and entered the fog-damp city.

Chapter 30

I
T WAS AN OLD
city and worn out and as if built for some future that came by but did not stop for long. The streets steamed ghostlike from the recent thrash of rain. They were dank streets into which the daylight could hardly penetrate.

He felt the eyes of the watchers as he passed by: waiting, isolated, suspicious.

Standing behind the old soaks and idlers were upright boys smoking cigarettes against the walls. They seemed content to smoke and age until they could ascend to the ranks of the sitters. It was a city of speculators who’d guessed the price of coal, lumber, labor, and now controlled such prices.

He passed in front of the Red Pony, a barroom decorated for Christmas the first year it opened. The red and green lights strung to the corners had burned eternally since. He stopped to calculate if he was old enough to buy a drink. He wasn’t, but he went in anyway and took a place in the shadows and before long he had a whisky and a beer. He wondered who these people were. He did not know any of them. He needed to leave and find his way home. It’d only been a year, but he’d come so far already and home was just a little ways more.

A weariness descended upon him and he was suddenly very tired. It’d been a long journey. His mouth was hurting for the loss of the tooth earlier that day. It’d been bothering him since St. Louis, so the captain put in at Huntington and he’d had it extracted. He declined the tooth-dentist’s offer of codeine and then accepted. On a whim he wanted to ask the dentist to please give him something for homecomings instead. But he didn’t. He liked the dentist. He was elderly with an enchanted disposition and was missing an arm, so whatever he did was slow and methodical and he did not seem to lack in any way for the missing arm.

Henry felt the whisky high in his throat and then down his neck and into his stomach where it glowed like a small hot sun. As the codeine’s ability to affect him wore off, the liquor took over with the taste of dull metals.

He had the bitter thought he’d find his father and tell him who he was, tell him Clemmie had died and never once had she spoken of him.

From the shadows, he listened to the squeak of the chalk and the clack of the balls. He looked at his watch. The hour was getting late. He ordered again.

The door opened and as more people came in he found himself in a pleasant state of mind. The door opened again, a party of men and women, and he thought he saw Mercy’s brother with them. The man’s face was round and florid and he sweated profusely. Trouble he did not need or want. There was something new and very dangerous inside him, the days of war shadowing his every thought. Watchful, he looked again and realized it wasn’t Randall.

In short time he’d had too many. He felt he was returning from some outer boundary of human existence and thought he was in the hell of an eternal return and never arriving. But then again, maybe it was only the whisky.

He waved a hand to catch the bartender’s eye.

“Is there a place to eat?”

“There’s a late-night diner right down the street.”

“What kind is it?”

“What kind? Why, how many kinds is there?”

Henry shrugged and put down his money. He guessed he really didn’t know how many kinds.

Outside, a wall of silver rain was lashing the street. In a second-floor window was a woman leaning on her elbows smoking a cigarette, watching the rain. The smoke from her cigarette glossed and hovered. The woman in the window looked down at him and would not give way. When he looked again she waved and smiled and he waved back.