The Same River Twice (17 page)

I scrounged a night job washing dishes at a bar near the waterfront. Free beer and food propped the low pay. The weather turned cold and I spent my days at the library for warmth, joining the rest of Salem's kooks, We all claimed chairs in the periodical room, pretending to read beneath the librarian's hostile gaze. When one of our band died, everyone moved up a seat, closer to the radiator. Rather than reading poems, I scribbled essays about the sheer joy of poetry, proclaiming poets as the true masters of language. Being one was vastly more important than committing verse to paper. The more pages I filled in my diary, the more I felt like a genuine bard.

Shadrack moved to Boston, and I could no longer afford to rent our dump. I crashed with a sympathetic waitress, who let me sleep in a hammock suspended in her kitchen. Eventually we began making sorties into each other's rooms. At the end of a year she left me for a Navy Seal because, as she said, “He knows what he wants from life.” I explained that poetry was just as valid as fastening bombs to enemy ships. She shot from the hip, barely aiming, and nailed me in my own cross hairs—I hadn't written a poem since we'd met.

When she asked for help moving, I agreed, thinking she would change her mind. After two days of divisive labor, she gave me a warm six-pack and took the hammock away. I slept on the floor. Boone had said that no Indian who claimed to be a friend had ever deceived him but you could never trust New Englanders.

T
he Iowa sky is a gray mosaic seen through bare tree limbs. Rita is uncomfortable in every position. Our child performs acrobatics within the placental tautness of her belly. Her urination has taken on the obsessive quality of a hobby and is the source of all conversation. At night the temperature drops to twenty below. Windchill reduces the air to negative sixty, offering the chance of death within five minutes. Skin will freeze in seconds.

While sleeping, Rita cradles her belly with her forearms, backside shoving against me, legs folded like wings. The seminal stage of family is already pushing me aside. I dress and leave at dawn. Crows chase a barred owl caught in the sun's pink glow.

The opacity of fresh snowfall unfolds like a silent fan. The woodpile tarp is welded to the ground. I have begun to see pregnancy everywhere, the curve of a belly, the strain of release. Women give form to the language of life. Without them, men are mute. If fatherhood is compromise, then motherhood is sacrifice, an abandoning for the sacred, an act of heroism. Aztec women who died in childbirth went to the same exalted branch of heaven as warriors slain in battle.

Frontier women had an average of eight babies apiece before they were Rita's age, often ruining their bodies in the process. Many died young. It was not uncommon for men to marry again after wearing the first wife out. The notion of Rita's death petrifies me into five minutes of somnolence, staring at an oak. Strips of snow lie in the furrows of its striated bark. I don't know which would be worse—losing my mate or raising a child alone. The obvious answer pummels me with shame. My concerns for Rita's mortality have little to do with her. I want her alive to make life easier for me.

I release the oak beside the river or perhaps the oak releases me. Blizzard scraps from two weeks back lie in shade strips cast by trees. Breath is condensing to ice on my beard. The control of fire keeps us warm and separates us from animals more than the wheel. Our house sits on a stretch of river between two sharp curves. Sewage from town prevents these bends from freezing and bald eagles have begun to fish the open water. They scan the river from high limbs. Water gurgles like distant music beneath the river's lid of ice, bubbling through the slits.

A groundhog trail is easy to recognize by the dirt it leaves mixed with snow. My tracks are the most obvious, the tread of boots with a turned-out angle to the stride. They look clumsy beside the elegance of fox prints, the petite mouse trail, the smooth swath left by a beaver's tail. Rita took a brief walk last week and I studied her tracks. Most humans come down hard on a heel or toe. Hers were balanced, both ends of each foot sunk deep, as she rocked the weight forward and back. She is tired of the house, of winter, of being pregnant. She tells me the payoff is worth the aggravation. For her, birth is an end; for me, the beginning of deeper concern. I am no better at keeping jobs than I ever was. I've only gotten better at finding them.

Beaver saliva twinkles in fresh wood chips, and the air is still as a crypt. My crunching footsteps are very loud. The absence of leaves allows me to see farther in the woods than in any other season. Farmers call this weather an open winter—cold and windy, barren as Detroit or the Bronx, sightlines spreading in every direction. I can view my life without obstruction. Everything leads to this moment. An eagle watches me from a mile away.

There are various places in the woods that are special to me, each marking where something occurred on an earlier trip. Nothing distinguishes them save the ghost of memory. Today I am visiting these areas, as comfortable with them as with an old friend. I come to the spot where I stood last fall skipping rocks across the river. One of my stones struck a crappie that was jumping for an insect. The geometry was pure—arcing stone, flashing fish, the sudden collision that left me weak. I felt abandoned by logic, alone as paternity on the rise. Water rejected a rock. The air welcomed a fish.

Last night's sleet covers every twig and bole with glittering ice, changing each tree to a thousand prisms. Snowflakes float big as nickels. I'm walking a world that sparkles around me. The floor of the woods has hardened like old varnish. Squirrels scurry easily along the veneer, but my boots stay on top for a millisecond before weight and gravity break the crust. My mind slows to the cadence of the frost.

These are the woods of Poweshieck, chief of Mesquakie, the Red Earth People. The remainder of his tribe lives in Tama County now, north of here. Last year Rita and I attended a powwow held in the town's rec center. White families watched from bleachers as dancers competed beneath basketball goals. They wore costumes passed down through generations. The Mesquakie beat rhythms on a single drum, singing the songs of the past. After the last Indian quilt was raffled off, the white people began to leave the gym.

Bear and panther were eliminated in my grandfather's day, bobcat and wolf in my father's. The last passenger pigeon died a captive in 1914. None of us can ever see a sabertooth. In recent years, Old Faithful has lost its fidelity; the spew is erratic and short, the product of land rendered impotent by men. Our species is becoming Icarus with melting wax and loss of altitude. The sea will drink us. The air will breathe us. The soil will eat our mulch.

My boots drop through the brittle surface, and the snow becomes a powdery beach of the lost midwestern sea. The ocean has receded and I am walking with the dodo, the condylarth, the living trilobite. A jetty of land is an open coral reef. Instead of birds, there are feathered creatures learning to glide. I am the only animal on its hind legs, bewildered by the ability to grasp. I become conscious of the self, which marks the fearing of death, our fatal flaw. I wear store-bought hides, lack decent claws and teeth. My nose is ruined from breathing the air of cities, and I need binoculars to aid my vision. A mouse can outrun me with no head start.

I sit on a downed poplar where last spring I found a petrified bullfrog the size of a brick. Its skin was leathery black. The frog's posture was halted on the verge of a leap, with the bones of its rear legs making humps in its back. It smelled bad. I spoke to a biologist, who asked to see it. He said that last year thousands of frogs had suddenly died and people were concerned. After a couple of days, he called, disappointed that my frog's death was explainable. It had frozen to death. I hung up the phone thinking about our penchant for uncommon deaths—the woman who is struck by lightning, the worker who drowns in a brewery, the man whose final coronary happens when he is making love. Jesus died in an unusual fashion and we still have not gotten over it.

This morning's walk ends at a channel that links the river to several ponds. The ice is covered with fox prints in frozen blood, and the oily feathers of a duck. During last year's high water, I steered my boat up the channel at night and enjoyed the purity of being lost in darkness, surrounded by the calling of owl and frog. Fish also wander into this waterway. Its mouth becomes blocked by brush, and when the water recedes, the fish are trapped in the ponds that slowly dry to mud.

Just before Rita became pregnant, we found a gar halfway along this channel. It was working through mud toward the river. A quick slithering motion yanked its body forward a few inches, where it rested briefly. We stared at a fish on land, dragging itself like a wounded soldier into safe territory. Its sheer exertion was appalling.

The gar is ancient, a throwback with its tough hide and alligator snout filled with dozens of sharp teeth. It is a relentless predator. The eggs of a gar are poison to other fish, so it has not changed much in sixty-five million years. Rita suggested I help the fish, but I refused, preferring not to tamper with nature. Watching a fish on land was like finding a mermaid, farfetched and wondrous.

Rita plunged into the muddy trench, falling several times. The gar got away from her twice. She finally caught it on her knees and grinned at me, mud specking her teeth. The river flowed behind her. She and the gar were covered with muck. Both seemed to have risen simultaneously from the earth. The woods around me faded to a void. I skipped backwards several million years to an antediluvial age when earth and water were more closely connected, when there was less division between dwellers of each. All creatures aspired to the expansive qualities of the amphibian.

Today the mud is hard as clay beneath the snow and ice. I'll be a father by the time water returns to the channel. The baby is long past its fish stage. Eyes initially occur on the side of its head before slowly moving forward. We are descendants of a Devonian fish, but our arrival on land was due to a failure in water, not to innate superior skills. Dominant forms arise from the lowly, the least specialized, the quickest to adapt. Humans are the underclass of evolution. Every other creature was better equipped.

The curled leaves of a burr oak rasp one another in the wind. The sun is a white glow in the sky. While walking out, I see a bald eagle tuck its wings and drop from the sky like a meteor. At the last second it opens its wings to brake. The talons swing forward and back, shattering the placid surface of water, and the eagle climbs into the air clutching a fish. The vision so discombobulates me that I momentarily forget to breathe. The soaring bird becomes a speck that disappears in the glare of full sunrise.

Decades of DDT have weakened the eggshells of eagles until a female can kill her young merely by warming the eggs. I am stricken by a sudden fear that Rita will fall out of bed and crush the fetus. I hurry home, reminding myself that the placenta is stronger and more complex than a spacesuit. It girdles the baby as the earth once protected all of humanity.

Rita is smiling when I enter the house. Heat from the stove draws steam from my clothes. My face stings. I stare through a mist of my own making, unable to tell her how glad I am that she's alive. I mention the gar and she nods, her eyes elsewhere, inside. We both glance away. The winter of our intimacy has made us shy.

S
hadrack was the first friend I'd had in years, and I decided to join him in Boston. He refused to take me in, saying I required too much psychic space. In Cambridge I interviewed with several “group houses” but my character betrayed me: I smoked, ate red meat, and was a Virgo—poor company to the enlightened. I dialed a number in a roommate tabloid and was interviewed at midnight by five insomniacs in Jamiaca Plain, known as J.P. They accepted me by unanimous decision, a fact that should have made me wary.

J.P. was considered one of Boston's bad neighborhoods, wedged into a slight gap between two worse neighborhoods. Renovated condos chipped the perimeter, the children of the white flight returning for revenge. The elevated orange line connected everyone by air. I lived near the Green Street station, an area I was often warned against. To protect myself, I wore a scarred leather jacket and a permanent scowl. While walking home one night, I watched a couple cross the street to avoid me, and half a block later cross back. It was one of the better moments of my urban life. I felt vindicated for the general apprehension I carried in the street.

The rooming house was a prewar blight waiting to be renovated and peddled floor by floor. A pair of nitwits who called themselves “urban pioneers” owned the building but lived in fancy Back Bay. A Puerto Rican family lived on the ground floor. The father, Romero, raised chickens in the backyard, and was the manager of the building. He could kick us out at whim, a terrible prospect because when a man finds himself living in a rooming house, there is no place left to go.

Six of us shared a moldy bathroom and a rat-infested kitchen. One guy ran a bankrupt construction business out of the hallway. All day and night his employees drifted around, young Israelis and Irish with no papers. They waited for work in the living room, comparing wars and scars, unified by hunger, cold, and exile. I've never seen Jews and Christians get along better.

I hooked a job at the Lune Café as the only waiter for lunch. The small room contained nine tables, revolutionary posters, and an organic menu. The cook was an antique hippie who held himself off the floor by one arm pretzeled through elastic legs. He grunted his name, Orion, while attaining nirvana beside the stove. A scrawny woman of forty emerged from the basement. She told me she was in therapy and believed that all psychologists should wash dishes. It was better than tofu or primal screaming.

“I've washed plenty,” I said.

Dazzled by a sympathetic audience, she ranted for twenty minutes about the collective healing power of woman. She told me that the earliest Chinese ideograph for “male” also meant “selfish.” Orion unfolded and shape-shifted to a full headstand. His shirt fell open to reveal a belly tattoo of the Aztec Sunstone radiating from his navel. He remained inverted until J.P.'s lunch rush. White boys with dreadlocks sprawled across two tables. Men wore earrings; the women shaved their heads. Conversation was tense and urgent, A guy with no hands ordered a salad and ate it like an animal while reading the
Daily Worker.