The Same River Twice (2 page)

The next day was smudged by a vicious hangover, a haze that stood between the world and me. When Rita came home from work, I asked her to join me at the kitchen table, where I'd placed her diaphragm, tube of jelly, and my emergency condoms. One by one, I dropped everything in the garbage. Rita's eyes were damp. She was smiling. There began my true education, after years of practice, in the ways of flesh. Sex with the goal of conception finally meant making love. The chief difficulty lay in shedding my adolescent fear of knocking her up.

After a winter of delirious sex with no fecundity, we were nervous that something was wrong. In early spring I began watching nature for clues. When ducks mated along the river, three males went after one female and they very nearly drowned her. She was left dazed in the shallows. The males flew casually away, their wings dimpling the surface of the water on each downstroke. I preferred the constancy of the great blue herons, bonding in pairs and returning yearly to the same nest.

Each month, Rita anxiously waited for her period, then cried when it came. She called the doctor, who told us to keep working, that during the peak of ovulation, fertilization fails three times out of four. A woman releases fewer than four hundred eggs in her lifetime. The average man makes a thousand sperm per second. Three or four good ejaculations was enough to populate the entire world, but I couldn't get my own wife pregnant.

To allay concerns for my manhood, I read several books on conception. An illustration of fallopian tubes looked like the horned skull of a steer hanging from a neighbor's barn. Ovulation was described as “an intra-abdominal event.” Ejaculation speeds reached two hundred inches per second, with sperm receiving a glucose bath by the female body for extra energy. The sperm spat enzymes to break down the wall of the nearest egg adrift from the ovary. When one finally drilled through the egg's outer shell, a trapdoor slammed shut behind it. I visualized everything happening on a large scale with accompanying sound effects and cheering, as in the Olympics.

Another guide, less technical, informed me that male orgasm fired an armada of three hundred million soldiers upriver to invade the cervix. Only one percent made it past the yoni's fierce beach. Half of these were captured and held in the zona pellucida. Prisoners had eight hours to fertilize or starve to death. The egg carried food to sustain itself, but the sperm traveled light for greater speed.

I spent an entire weekend staring silently at the river, worried that my army was composed of lazy draftees. Years of drug abuse had so confused my sperm that they couldn't swim a straight line. Rita suggested I consult our doctor, who assured me that I manufactured fresh goods every ninety days. “Think of it as a mom-and-pop store,” she said. “Low overhead with a quick turnover.”

She gave Rita a thermometer and a chart to monitor her ovulation. I began to wear boxer shorts. I'd read that the men of primitive cultures dipped their testicles in boiling water as a means of birth control; it seemed possible that the inverse might hold true. I filled a coffee cup with ice water and stared at it a full hour, never quite summoning the courage for immersion.

My next trip to the library yielded a pop-up book about conception. A gigantic lingam sprang from the pages, followed by a yoni the size of an animal den. The centerfold offered a huge multilevel egg. The sperm were tiny by comparison, except for one monster that dived into a slot when you opened and closed the book. The text said it was sinking its payload.

I am not by nature a squeamish man, but that pop-up book made me feel like a person who'd looked on the face of God—bewildered, regretful, possessor of forbidden knowledge. I took a long walk in the floodplain woods. A turtle rooted along a sandy bend in the river, hunting a spot to lay her eggs. I was envious until I realized we were both in the same fix—animal sex is only a billion and a half years old. I went home and threw the graph and thermometer in the trash. Turtles don't need maps. They're just slow.

On the first warm night of April, Rita and I drove to town and scaled the chain-link fence that enclosed the public swimming pool. I lurked in the shallows and watched for the law while Rita performed a flip off the high board. Her underwear flashed white against the black sky, a lovely sight, as if Virgo had become a mobile constellation, descending to earth with a graceful splash. We left the pool for a clump of shadowed oaks in the park. The sweet grass adhered to our limbs. I felt like Zeus field-testing his swan suit before the seduction of Leda. Gamete met zygote. DNA merged into the corkscrew that resembled the Milky Way's spiral, Hermes' Staff, the swift helix of infant birth.

Two weeks later Rita called from the doctor's office. She spoke fast, her voice husky with tears and glory. The test was positive. I went outside and lay down beside the river. Blue dragonflies were mating so hard they rattled dry weeds. The land seemed to recede beneath me, leaving me prone in the air, as if residing between sky and earth. The clouds moved like surf. I was stationary while all existence was on the glide.

I never thought I'd be married, let alone mutate into a father. Such normal events had never seemed to have a place in my life. To mark the occasion, I bought an aluminum skiff with a six horse-power engine, and dubbed it Lily, Rita's middle name. I moored it in the river twenty yards from the house and felt a little better prepared for fatherhood.

Throughout April, the river rose and fell, so controlled by a dam that it was barely a river except to the fox that stalked its bank. When the sound of a dying duck crossed the water at night, I thought of that old tree falling when no one's there, and understood that regardless of listeners, the fox would kill a duck. In the same way, I realized that the baby really would be born.

We began seeing other pregnant women in town. Like locusts, they were emerging in warm weather. Rita felt the kinship of sisterhood, while I enjoyed a strange pride, as if responsible for all pregnancy. It was a potent sensation that lasted until the first of our monthly appointments with the doctor. I wanted desperately to be involved, but felt superfluous, a specialist who'd done his duty. There was so much focus on Rita that I became envious. Toward the end of each appointment, I'd invent some imaginary ailment to ask the doctor about. She always rolled her eyes, winked at Rita, and pronounced me fine.

Rita's appetite for food increased, and I responded by drinking for two. After she went to bed, I drove to a bar and shot pool with the same fervor I had in Kentucky, staking my identity on each game. Younger women grouped around Rita like acolytes hoping for insight. They were flirtatious with me, as if impending fatherhood made me safe, no longer a sexual threat. There were twenty-four thousand genes inside Rita's womb, forming a kid that was half me, a quarter my parents and so on. Going back a mere thirty-two generations gives each person over four billion ancestors, more people than currently dwelt on earth. The responsibility to procreate was over. All I had to do was guide it through the next eighteen years, the task of life.

One night a waning gibbous moon drowned the river with light. A barred owl yelled for company and I stepped into the yard to mimic its eight high-pitched cries that ended in a gurgle. The owl hollered back, closer. We repeated ourselves twice more, until the owl recognized my foreign accent and cast a disdainful silence through the darkness. In the morning, I told Rita of my worry that our child would treat me in the same manner. She patted the bulge in her middle.

“You'll speak the same language,” she said. “It's a baby, not a bird.”

I nodded and left for the woods, pondering the wisdom of my wife. Fatherhood implies an automatic taming, the necessity of employment, a beginning of ownership. I'd expected glimmers of paternal anxiety but the onrush of fears was a box canyon ambush. I doubted my abilities to raise a child without ruining it. Although I trusted Rita implicitly, in my worst moments I worried that the baby might not be mine. At other times I was convinced that some long-buried Offutt gene would surface, producing a sideshow freak. Mainly, I was afraid that Rita's love would shift away from me.

Most of our friends were single and none had children. Some envied the pregnancy, while others considered us brave, possibly stupid. We had no one to talk to, no models of how people dealt with kids. I mentioned this in a pokergame, and a guy derisively asked if I thought I was the first man to father a child. I said nothing because the answer was yes, that was exactly how I felt. I knew that drastic change was coming, but had no way to prepare for it.

My life's progression had been a toxic voyage bringing me to the safety of the flatland, where I began each day by entering the woods along the river. I've become adept at tracking animals, finding the final footprint of skull and bone. Many people are afraid of the woods but that's where I keep my fears. I visit them every day. The trees know me, the riverbank accepts my path. Alone in the woods, it is I who is gestating, preparing for life.

W
here I'm from, the foothills of southern Appalachia are humped like a kicked rug, full of steep furrows. Families live scattered among the ridges and hollows in tiny communities containing no formal elements save a post office. My hometown is a zip code with a creek. We used to have a store but the man who ran it died. Long before my birth, a union invalidated the company scrip, shut the mines, and left a few men dead. Two hundred people live there now.

Our hills are the most isolated area of America, the subject of countless doctoral theses. It's an odd sensation to read about yourself as counterpart to the aborigine or Eskimo. If VISTA wasn't bothering us, some clown was running around the hills with a tape recorder. Strangers told us we spoke Elizabethan English, that we were contemporary ancestors to everyone else. They told us the correct way to pronounce “Appalachia,” as if we didn't know where we'd been living for the past three hundred years.

One social scientist proclaimed us criminal Scotch-Irish clansmen deemed unfit to live in Britain—our hills as precursor to Australia's penal colony. Another book called us the heirs to errant Phoenicians shipwrecked long before Columbus seduced Isabella for tub fare. My favorite legend made us Melungeons, a mysterious batch of folk possessing ungodly woodskills. We can spot fleas hopping from dog to dog at a hundred yards; we can track a week-old snake trail across bare rock. If you don't believe it, just ask the sociologist, who spent a season like a fungus in the hills.

The popular view of Appalachia is a land where every man is willing, at the drop of a proverbial overall strap, to shoot, fight, or fuck anything on hind legs. We're men who buy half-pints of boot-legged liquor and throw the lids away in order to finish the whiskey in one laughing, brawling night, not caring where we wake or how far from home. Men alleged to eat spiders off the floor to display our strength, a downright ornery bunch.

The dirt truth is a hair different. The men of my generation live in the remnants of a world that still maintains a frontier mentality. Women accept and endure, holding the families tight. Mountain culture expects its males to undergo various rites of manhood, but genuine tribulation under fire no longer exists. We've had to create our own.

Once a week, Mom drove fifteen miles to town for groceries, accompanied by her children. We visited the interstate, which was creeping closer in tiny increments, bisecting hills and property, rerouting creeks. We called it the four-laner. It slithered in our direction like a giant snake. Mom said 1-64 ran clear to California, a meaningless distance since none of us had ever crossed the county line. The completed road linked the world to the hills, but failed to connect us to the world.

I never intended to quit high school, but like many of my peers, I simply lost the habit. Education was for fools. Girls went to college seeking a husband; boys went to work. The pool hall's grimy floor, stained block walls, and furtive tension suited me well. The only requirement was adherence to an unspoken code of ethics, a complex paradigm that I still carry today, A rack of balls cost a dime, cheeseburgers a quarter. I ran the table three times in a row one day, and afterwards could not find a willing player. Inadvertently I had alienated myself from the only society that had ever tolerated me, a pattern that would continue for years.

After a week of shooting pool alone, I was ripe for an army recruiter who culled the pool hall like a pimp at Port Authority. I was under age but my parents gleefully signed the induction papers. The recruiter ferried me a hundred miles to Lexington, where I failed the physical examination.

“Albumin in the urine,” the doctor said. “No branch will take you.”

I felt weak. Tears cut lines down my face. My own body had trapped me in the hills, spirit pinioned by the flesh. I didn't know which was worse, the shame of physical betrayal or the humiliation of having cried in front of a hundred eager men-to-be. They moved away from me to hide their own embarrassment. I was subsequently denied admittance to the Peace Corps, park rangers, -the ranks of firemen and police. I'd never know camaraderie, or test myself in sanctioned ways against other men.

That summer I began to steal and smoke dope, and in the fall I had no choice but to attend college. The only school within the mountains had recently become a university. After two years, I quit and announced my plans to become an actor in New York. Jennipher, the one girl I'd had the courage to love, had married a quarterback and moved far away. My sisters considered me a hopeless redneck. My brother refused to live with me, and my father and I hadn't spoken civilly in upwards of thirty-eight months.

Mom fixed me a sack lunch the morning I left. We sat quietly at the completed highway, staring at the fresh, clean blacktop. Mom was trying not to cry. I felt bad for being the first to erode the family, though I'd already been at it for a while. The road stretched to the horizon like a wide creek and I thought of Daniel Boone questing for space. The road in had become a way out.