The River Queen (32 page)

I make my Folgers with three “tea” bags and find Jerry on the landing. He's chatting with someone he's just met on the dock, a guy with a big cruiser named
Bronx Cheer.
As he sees me coming, I give him a wave. “Are you talkable to, Jerry?”

“Roger,” he replies.

“I understand you're thinking about going up the Ohio and taking the
River Queen
down the Tennessee. Is that right?”

“It's a thought,” he says in his inimitable way.

“Well, are you going to keep going?”

“Yeah, that's right. I figured if we're moving south, I may as well keep moving her.”

I nod, taking this in. “Well, I was wondering, do I have to leave the boat at Cairo? I'd like to keep going.…” I find these conversations with Jerry inscrutable and incredibly complicated. But now I know what it is I want. “I'd like to go as far as you guys are going.”

Jerry shows no emotion one way or the other. “Well, we're going to end up somewhere in Tennessee.”

“Then I'd like to go with you.” As it is with all decisions Jerry makes, nothing is said. It is just understood that this is what will happen. I'll go where they go. Jerry and I stand, sipping our coffee, eyes on the river. Just then Tom's cell phone rings and I hear him talking. When he is done, he opens the aft door and shouts to us, “That was big sis! She says this weather's gonna be clear ahead.”

“Great,” Jerry says and I agree.

“But there's tornadoes in Tennessee.” And then he gives us his big whooping laugh.

*   *   *

We need fuel before we can leave—an experience I'm starting to dread like a trip to the dentist—and I was hoping for a shower, but the one at Hoppie's isn't working. Jerry is annoyed because
Bronx Cheer,
which has just gassed up, is holding a space at the gas dock while his friend gasses up. This is slowing us down and for Jerry this behavior is rude.

But I guess my disappointment is palpable because Jerry asks, “What's wrong?”

“I was hoping for a shower.”

“Well, we could hook up that river pump again.” But I don't want to. There are lots of boats moored here, some big fancy ones, and I just can't see myself bathing on the dock. “Well,” Jerry grumbles, “I suppose you could do the shower.”

The shower. Our elusive shower. The thing I have yet to try. I'm all over it. “Yes,” I say. But first there's a hose that has to be hooked up and a warning that there's no hot water. “I don't care. Cold water is fine.”

While they do the hose, I remove the axe, vacuum, and baseball bat being stowed there. I am actually going to shower, naked, on our boat. I wait a few moments and when they say they are ready, I slip in. I turn on the water.

Nothing happens for a moment, but then it does. A trickle of freezing water sputters over me, chilling me to the bone. I stand under it for two minutes, shivering, not bothering with the soap or shampoo. I can hear the water pump, banging away, and picture Jerry standing there, timing me with his watch.

*   *   *

Fern and Hoppie are an aging married couple, two old salts, and they have braced their landing on the hull of a Civil War gunboat, Fern tells us. “We don't know which side they were fighting for, but they went down here.” Fern leads me to the river's edge, where I'm trying to warm up in the sun. In the water I see the remnants of the Civil War vessel. The front, she tells me, is a sharp rammer, used to bring other boats down. “We just don't know if it was for the North or the South,” she says.

A few other people join us. Two of the women have very large dogs—a Bernese Mountain Dog and an Irish Wolfhound puppy. It turns out they are doing the Great Loop. They've given themselves a year to complete this. I am amazed, not only that they are doing this trip, but that they intend to do it with two huge dogs.

We've got a little time before we have to “rock 'n' roll” and we sit down with Fern, who wears an anchor necklace. She adjusts her barrels of potted plants, then settles into a lawn chair. She lights up a cigarette and starts talking about women on the river. “I give lessons, you know.… Women need to know how to operate a vessel,” she says. “How to get help. They need to know how to anchor, dock, start, and operate.…” I'm nodding my head. I can now maneuver on the river. I can start the boat and I could anchor if I had to. But Jerry doesn't let anyone but himself dock or go through the locks and dams.

“Women need to know how to take care of themselves,” Fern tells me. “I take 'em out on the river and show them. I've taught women to be first mates and captains. I don't like to see a woman out there, not knowing what she's doing. Men,” she says, “they don't have the patience for teaching.”

41

I
T IS
a glorious day as we set off for Cape Girardeau. The end of Rita has left the weather cool and clear. Just warm enough, a sweet, precious day. We have maybe six hours and about a hundred river miles ahead of us. The boys are hungry as we depart, so I heat up some of the Italian sausage with some pasta leftovers and make a salad for myself. I slip Samantha Jean a little sausage and she licks my hand. Now I'm ready to listen to Fern's advice.

It is time for me to learn the basic seaman's knot. I am tired of standing back as they tie up lines. I want to do it too. It is midday and I take a piece of rope. “Show me how you tie that knot,” I say to Tom and Jerry as we all relax on the flybridge.

“You mean a bowline?” Jerry asks. “It's easy.” He twists the rope into four or five directions, using the hand that is missing half its fingers.

“Can you do that more slowly?” I ask.

“Here,” Tom says, taking the rope from Jerry. He holds it between his hands. “The rabbit goes down in the hole, out of the hole, around the tree, and back in the hole again.”

I watch as he twists the rope. Rabbit goes down the hole, out, around the tree. Down, out, around, and in. Down, out, around, and in. I'm watching, but it looks more like out, around, down, and in to me. They tell me to take the piece of rope and practice tying it to the chair or to my own leg. My own leg is actually easier and I hold it up in the air. Down, out, around, and in. No matter what I do it still resembles a kid's shoelace knot.

Tom takes the rope again into his big thick hands and makes it move like a trapeze act. He ties up to things he claims would hold a hundred-foot barge. He ties his knot to the captain's chair and lifts it into the sky. I take my piece of rope back down to the bow to practice. Rabbit goes down or out. What exactly does it do around that tree?

I envision a small furry bunny, a fluffy brown thing. Once when I was little a mother rabbit gave birth to four bunnies in our yard, but our dog killed them all. A few years later I got a white rabbit with red eyes as an Easter gift. I would hold that rabbit by the ears and toss it around the yard. It wasn't the only animal I ever tormented. I killed my mother guppy when she ate her young. I tied up a neighbor's dog and beat it with a stick, wanting it to obey.

Now I know, of course, that such action is a sign of sociopathic behavior in children. Was I a sociopath? If I could control the world around me—the world of rabbits, fish, dogs—the way my father wanted to control us, keep us in line, if I could get them to do it, then maybe everything would be all right. I wanted these creatures to obey me as I tried to obey him.

“If there's a wrong way to do something, you'll find it,” I hear him say as I try to do my knot. This is the voice I prefer not to hear. It is not where I want to go. Why is my mind taking me to this place? But love is never simple, is it? Never really so cut and dried.

Down, out, around, in.

At Mile 110 I take the wheel. Underneath I feel the current and it is very strong. I am having trouble keeping a straight course. I struggle with it.

Jerry tells me the current is strong here because the bottom is uneven. There are forces beneath the surface you can't really see. “It would be difficult for anyone to pilot here,” he says.

I return to my place on the bow. Dozens of monarch butterflies flutter past.

We pass the Chester State Prison. A sign reads
LANDING—PRIVATE
. I'm sure it is. I'm using my binoculars all the time now to read daymarkers, indicators on bridges, at the locks and dams, to locate our whereabouts. After the prison, I return to my knot.
Cowboy Carl,
a tow with barge, comes by us too fast on the starboard side and soaks us in his wake.

They've given me enough rope to hang myself, shall we say. I go back up to the flybridge, where Jerry who is left-handed and a bit more patient tries to show me again. Still, my knots look more like something you'd put on a Christmas gift than use to tie up an eighteen-thousand-pound boat.

But left to right has never been my strength. Tying knots never came easily to me. I flunked the shoelace tying lesson in Ms. Partlow's second grade. If someone taught me how to hit a baseball right-handed, I played, and still play, as a righty. I throw and kick, such as it is, as a lefty; I play golf as a righty, but can barely swipe my Metrocard in New York City, which is always a right-handed motion. And so on.

I recall shoe tying as a trauma of a left-handed youth. I only succeeded when my seatmate and best friend, Tommy Hinds, patiently instructed me. But I never learned very well. For the whole school year Tommy stooped down at my feet and tied my shoes. I can still see him. His blond head bent over my sneakers.

He was the first boy to show me real kindness and we were true friends. Perhaps he was my first boyfriend. We remained that way until third grade when he broke his leg during a simple fall from his bed and he died from bone cancer the following year.

*   *   *

We want to reach Cape Girardeau by dark, but there's only a gas dock there, not really a place to tie up for the night. We decide to bivouac on the Illinois side of the river. At Mile 61.7 I spot a lovely strip of beach. “Can we go there?” We locate it on our navigational maps. It is a sandbar called Dusky's Bar beside a channel called the Picayune Chute. “This is good,” Jerry tells me as we gaze at the maps. “It's accessible only by boat. There's no access road. No one can come near us. You don't want to tempt fate, you know.…”

Please, I whisper, please, don't tell me a story about someone being murdered on a beach. It is a missed opportunity perhaps, but Jerry lets it pass. But there are other issues, he says, as we make our way toward it. We are a distance from the fueling dock and we need fuel. We have an eight a.m. appointment with the gas man, who will make a special trip if you call ahead for gas. “It means we'll have to leave by six a.m.,” Jerry says.

But he is more concerned about anchoring just off the main channel. He is worried about the wake of barges and tows. “I don't want to get pushed up onto a beach,” he says. “Or trapped by a loose barge.”

Trapped by a loose barge. I am calculating what the chances are of this happening. “I know a guy back at the marina in La Crosse. Twice he said he got stuck on the beach by a loose barge.” Somehow I feel willing to take the odds against being pinned against the sandbar by a runaway barge. In the end I convince Jerry that it's a perfect little strip of beach—isolated and pristine. And though he's loath to agree with me or even tell me that he has agreed, he points the
River Queen's
nose toward shore and heads her straight toward the inlet, next to the Picayune Chute.

Checking the draft, he nods, and this seems to mean we're all right. I feel the bow as she begins to rub up against the sand and in another moment we are tucked onto the shore. Tom jumps off with an anchorline and pulls her ahead as hard as he can. Then he sets the anchor lines, burying each one in the sand.

As soon as we are anchored, Tom pulls Samantha Jean onto our beach for a run in the waves and I announce I'm going to take a bath before it gets dark. “Knock yourself out,” Jerry tells me.

This time I do it right. I put on my river shoes and borrow Jerry's fashionable L. L. Bean snug zip-up life vest. No more of that antique orange thing for me, though here the tug of the current isn't so strong. I take my towel, shampoo, and soap. I am sweaty. My body smells. I walk out into the river and scrub my face and hands. The back of my neck. My armpits. I scrub and wash. I dive into the murky water, then wash again.

“Hey,” Tom shouts as he heads off, axe in hand to chop wood, “Mary's taking a mud bath!” This is a new level of Mississippi baptism, but one I am prepared to make. I turn my back to him, pretending to give him a snub. But now I've been christened in the waters of the river too. I float on my back, watching the sun crest the tops of trees on the western bank.

In the final few moments of daylight I walk the beach as Tom gathers wood for a fire. Jerry has the grill going. It is a cool, calm night. A breeze blows. I'm sitting on a log. There are no mosquitoes and just a hint of fall. I watch the sky turn a shade of crimson, then purple, as the sun quite literally sets in the west.

Tom returns, lugging half a tree above his head like the hunter and gatherer he is. He builds a huge campfire, but then gets pouty because we don't want to sit right in front of it. We have grilled chicken breasts with orange slices, rice pilaf, carrots, and broccoli. He eats his dinner alone in front of the fire. “Let him be,” Jerry says. “He's just being Tom.”

Without a word Tom goes right to bed after dinner as he always does and Jerry and I sit by the fire, which is dying down. The “genie” is off and there isn't a sound, except crickets and the lapping of the waves. “This is what I love,” Jerry tells me. “I could just live like this all the time. On a beach on the river. Not many people know what this is like.”

The night is full of stars and I tip my head back to see them. Jerry's brought out some beers and he gives me a bottle of his best imported, an honor, I believe. I don't really drink beer, but this one tastes good and cold. “It's so quiet,” I tell him.