Old Glory (59 page)

It was a life more cut off than that of almost any oceangoing seaman. It was far more taxing in other ways, too. Once out of port, a ship at sea can be left to steer itself for days on end. The officers on the bridge keep a casual watch on the autopilot, the radar and the digital readout on the Decca navigation system. The
Frank Stegbauer
had to be coaxed and steered down every inch of river. The stack of Ziploc bags was a measure of the constant nursing which the towboat needed. If you took your eye away from the river for a minute, the tow would happily plunge off and wreck itself on a sandbar or deep in a forest.

“I stopped at Caruthersville,” I said, remembering it as a muddy un-place. “I didn’t see much of the town.”

“Me neither,” Al said. He pulled out his wallet from the back pocket of his jeans and thumbed through it for a photograph. His wife and two smiling daughters stood in front of a newly painted frame house. “That’s my family. We don’t have nothing to do with Caruthersville
society. If they don’t bother me, I won’t bother them none. That’s my motto.”

His self-containment was almost absolute. He had one family on the tow and another on the beach. Between them, they kept Al supplied with as much of the world as he cared to deal with.

The murky brown went steadily darker into night. Al switched on the carbide searchlights and raked the river with them. Rain caught in their beams showed as a stream of bright Patna rice. The curving line of green glints to our starboard was a string of buoys. We seemed to be hardly moving. Our swiveling lights worked like the antennae of a cautious insect. We felt our way along on them, letting them gently brush the trees, the buoys and the smoky twists of fog that were beginning to riddle the water. Another tow was coming upstream around the bend. Its lights blundered, then tangled with ours, as if we were exploring the idea of mating.

I went down to supper in the galley, where Bill the engineer showed me another photograph. In the dislocated world of the towboat, photographs were precious things. Like Al’s, Bill’s picture was cracked and fading. I wondered how many times a day he got it out of his wallet and put it back again.

“That’s my reason for being here,” he said.

There were no people. The Polaroid snap showed a ranch house in a forest clearing.

“I just finished building that. It’s up out in the Ozarks. I got forty acres with the house.”

“It looks marvelous.” It did.

“I’m paying off a ten-year mortgage at four hundred bucks a month. If I was on the beach there’s no way I could afford that kind of money. When I got that paid off, I’m going to get off the river, farm that land, buy me some more acres …”

Chigger had a photograph too. His was of a young woman.

“You think she’s pretty?”

“Very. She’s beautiful.”

“She’s real bright, too. She’s at junior college.”

Chigger himself looked like an E. W. Kemble illustration for
Tom Sawyer
. He wore a felt hat, bright green suspenders and jeans rolled up to his calves. With his pale fluff of beard he looked too young for the smart young woman in the picture with her serious eyes.

“She’s talking about getting married.” His voice hiccuped from a squeaky treble to an uncertain baritone. “I ain’t so sure. I tell myself:
You’ve only seen Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi, and you’re nineteen years old.…”

All of Chigger’s ambition was focused on the river. On the beach, he had worked in a paper mill for a year and dreamed of becoming a Mississippi pilot. Whenever he was allowed to, he steered the tow. On his off-watches, he studied the charts, learning the river. There was no formal apprenticeship for pilots. Deckhands turned into pilots by a process of slow osmosis. In two years, Chigger would be old enough to apply for a license.

“You know? I could be the youngest pilot on the river. Hell, when I’m, like twenty-five, something like that, I could be a
captain
. Like Mac.”

In the pilothouse, Mac had taken over the night watch. He was the grandfather of the boat. His mottled face, dentures and glasses made him look as if he might be more in place sitting by a fire in his slippers instead of pushing nine thousand tons of ammonia through a filthy night on the river.

There were flashes of sheet lightning ahead. The searchlights rested on fog banks as thick and hard-edged as clouds seen from above on a high-altitude flight.

“Shoot,” said Mac; then “shit”; then “shoot” again.

The river now was legible only in the bright copper-colored picture on the radar screen. The lights picked out little cattle ponds of water in the gaps between the fog. The hostile weather had made the strangely tender quality of the talk over the radio even tenderer.

“Now you come in here real close with me, Cap.”

“I’m tight with you now. Okay?”

“That’s fine and dandy.”

The captains inquired after each other’s wives and children. Everyone was just called “Cap” over the radio. People had made close friends with familiar voices without ever knowing the names of their owners. “Cap” was enough. If your name was “Cap” you were a buddy.

We might have been far out at sea, with nothing but pillars of ocherous fog and narrow, winding tracks of water. Then, suddenly, just a few yards ahead of the leading barges, there would be trees, a caving cliff of riverbank, a rock revetment. Once, the black wedge of a barge came nuzzling out of the fog a hundred feet or so to port.

“Hey, Cap!” called Mac over the radio. “You’re running so goddamn close, you want me to spit in your engine room?”

“Sorry, Cap. I got you now. Hey, what you got in them fancy barges, for god sakes?”

“
P’ison,
” Mac said with an air of grand smugness. “
Mone-yer.
”

“Shit, Cap—I coulda cut you half in two.”

“That’s just what I was thinking. Have a good trip, now.”

“You too, Cap. And don’t go letting that ’monia out all over the river. This goddamn fog’s bad enough for my sonofabitch lungs.”

The farther south we went, the more the fog thickened. Our lights made a low tunnel into which Mac fed the tow fleet inch by inch.

“I done enjoying just about as much of this as I can stand,” he said. “Times like this, I think if I was at home they’d never get me out again. Shoot.” The tow was going on a sidewise slide. “Rat’s-ass eddy.” We straightened up again. “I wouldn’t want to wish this on my worst enemy, not on a night like this.”

All down the river, the tow fleets were laying up inshore. Eventually, Mac too gave in. He sent the four bargemen and deckhands forward, where they disappeared into the fog and turned into more voices on the radio. I watched the radar screen. The river made a slow turn around 180 degrees, and the leading barges touched the bank with a grind and a bump. As Mac eased the towboat in on the current, the searchlight beam traveled along the levee and lit up a herd of grazing deer. They looked like silver-paper cutouts. For a moment they were quite still, mesmerized by the light; then they scattered into the forest.

With the engines off, I could listen to the river. As it scoured the hulls of the barges and sluiced past our stern, it sounded as if it were breathing heavily in its sleep, making a continuous line of z’s. Mac was brewing coffee in the percolator.

“Well, now you’ve seen what a bad night on the river’s like. They don’t come much worse than this.”

He had been working on the Mississippi since 1937, when he had started running tugs around Memphis harbor. There were still steamboats then, and Mac could remember them lining the wharf, packed solid with bales of cotton.

“They say now they was the good old days. Seems to me that taken all around, they was bad days, mostly. I never saw too much
ro
-mance in ’em.”

I slept for a few hours in a cabin that had most motel rooms beaten hollow for comfort. When I woke I could hear the stir of the engines in the dark. AI was in the pilothouse.

“We gone by Greenville now,” he said. “Ain’t nothing to see of Greenville at five in the morning, or I’d have called you.”

“Happy Thanksgiving Day,” I said.

“I don’t reckon we got a lot to celebrate about, this Thanksgiving.”

The Iranian students had let thirteen of the embassy hostages go—they were all either female or black—but had announced that they intended to put the remaining Americans on trial as spies. At ten thirty each night, ABC Television was putting out a program titled
America Held Hostage
. The significant thing about this daily reminder of the Iranian crisis was the absence of the
n
and the
s
. The whole affair was seen less as the infliction of an outrage on the people in the embassy than as the ritual, public humiliation of the whole country. The United States itself was being bound, gagged, blindfolded and displayed by its captors to the world. Like millions of others, Al took this slight as an offense to his personal pride. It had soured Thanksgiving for him.

At least, the fog had gone. As dawn came up, the river went to a dim, gauzy gray. We were leaving a trail of ragged creases in the water behind us. Both shores were unbroken cypress swamps. We passed between sandbars as cold and bare as bits of Mongolian desert. I was very glad that I wasn’t going alone through this landscape. One’s inner resources would have to be in extraordinarily good shape: otherwise the place could only seem like a gigantic reflection of just about everything one had known of emptiness and loss.

“Where is this?”

“Mile 515. Worthington Cut-Off. Island 88.”

I stored the names; they sounded like useful symbols of something lowering and bleak. In mid-channel, we plowed slowly down the state line: out of Mississippi, out of Arkansas, in the empty crack between the states. We reached a wide-open tract of water. No other tows were in sight.

“You want to try steering her? See how you get along?”

“Sure.”

The nearest I had come before to driving a tow was managing narrowboats on British canals. The experiences are not comparable. This was more like trying to steer six or seven blocks of Madison Avenue down a twisty country lane. If one gave a four-degree shift of the driving bar, the movement of the rudder slowly communicated itself along the length of the fleet, and an hour or so later the leading barges would begin to swing off course against the line of trees on the far bank. I tried to keep my adjustments tiny; a degree here, a degree there, learning to wait for the tardy response of the barges at the front. I reminded myself that this was a small tow; a big one would have been half as wide again and more than twice as long.

“You seen that skiff over there?” Al pointed to a fishing boat a mile ahead of us. It was a flyspeck on the glass. “That’s
you.
”

“I’d sooner not think about that.”

“If he was in our way now, we couldn’t stop for him. You’d go into reverse right now, you’d still run him down. Now,
watch
him. Make sure he don’t decide to do some blame-fool thing like come across the channel.”

“Do you want to take over?”

“No, you’re doing fine. I tell you, I never seen a deckhand steer as good as you, not first time out.”

Immodestly basking in this compliment, I let the tow wander, then overcorrected it. Al laughed. “You
was
doing fine. Now I’d say you was about average.”

We shook on a boil. Through the bars I could feel the gouts of water trying to wrest the rudder out of kilter. Seeing an eddy ahead, I took the tow wide of it along the same curving course that I would have steered in my own boat.

“Yeah,” said Al. “You got a real feel for the river. I guess you must have picked up something, coming down in that crazy little boat you got. I reckon, seeing you now, you could make a pilot.”

“That’s the best thing anybody’s said to me on this trip so far.”

“Okay, I’ll take her now. There’s a chute just on a ways; we got to go down flanking.”

“Is flanking the same as backing up?”

“Yeah.”

“So, when will you let me back up down a chute?”

“Well, if you’re still with us next Thanksgiving … 
maybe.
”

The weather was coming, uncharacteristically, from the east; an opaque gray wall of rain which sidled across the swampland on the Mississippi side, paused, stretched, included the river at a bound, and went on deep into Louisiana. My tenth and last state.

At noon we sat down to a Thanksgiving spread in the galley. No one said much. The turkey, sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce were too powerfully reminiscent of other, family Thanksgivings, and the men’s thoughts were somewhere else, probably lost in the world of the photographs in their billfolds. I tried to remember my long-ago reading of William Bradford. It was Bradford who, in 1621, proclaimed the first Thanksgiving Day, after the sickly remnant of the Pilgrim Fathers had survived the terrible New England winter after landing at Cape Cod in the
Mayflower
.

Indians had taught the settlers how to grow corn and brought them four wild turkeys.

So, with the rain streaking the galley windows, we dug into our mounds of deep-frozen turkey, brought out to us by the supply boat from Waterways Marine. Away from home, afloat in a real wilderness, we were closer than most, I thought, to the spirit of that original Thanksgiving. I doubted if Bradford and Miles Standish and William Brewster had gone in for a great deal of polite conversation over their turkey either.

Two miles above Vicksburg the tow slowed in midstream and my boat was lowered over the side. It was much like going back to school after the holidays. I said my goodbyes and headed out across a rough patch of shoal water through the stinging rain. The Louisiana shore was a jungly swamp of willows, cypresses, cane and kudzu vines. The bluff of Vicksburg, on the far side of the river, was like a smeared thumbprint. I hung back on the current, waiting for the
Frank Stegbauer
to round Vicksburg bend, then crossed over to the mouth of the Yazoo River, skidded on the slick of an eddy, and reached Vicksburg Harbor feeling cold, sodden and very out of sorts. I had been under the innocent illusion that the sun shone all year on the Deep South. This was a wet English winter day. I tied up to a slippery jetty, my fingers too numbed to make proper knots. The city was as quiet and dripping as the swamp. It rose steeply behind its concrete floodwall in a greasy cliff of banked roofs and rivery streets. The blurred taillights of a car disappeared over the top of the hill. It looked as if it might well be the last car in town.