Old Glory (64 page)

“It wasn’t like this on the last tow I was on,” I said.

“No, well, when they built this, they asked me what I wanted. They gave me about half of what I asked for. I kind of like my creature comforts.”

He reached into a refrigerator for a pack of cigarettes. I moved his twelve-string guitar along the sofa and sat down. I could see him more clearly now. He had a moody Italian face, with tired eyes deeply recessed in his head. He was staring into the radar screen at his side, his mouth moving silently inside its framing circle of black beard.

I said, “I would have taken you for an Italian, except that Kelley’s about the least Italian name I’ve ever heard.”

“Uh-uh. Now, my grandmother, she was a pure Choctaw. My grandfather was Irish. He was a horse trader. My other grandmother, she was Scotch … I guess there’s a bit of everything in me. Bit of Irish … bit of Scotch … bit of Indian … bit of Mexican …” He ran his hand through his spiky bush of black hair. “Must be a bit of nigger in there, too, I reckon. But I ain’t never heard of any Italian.”

He had always worked on water; first as a seaman in the Merchant Marine, then in the U.S. Coast Guard.

“Could you go back to the sea?”

“No, I never could. Once this river gets a hold on you, you don’t leave it.”

He nudged the fleet through the tight chute above St. Catherine’s Bend, reading the river yard by yard with his swiveling searchlight. I told him about my own trip.

“You notice something different about the people on the river than the people on the beach?”

“Yes, all the time.”

“I feel the difference. It’s a whole way of thinking … something kind of philosophical.”

We wound slowly through the swampland in the dark. The edge of the water showed as a line of tarnished silver against the black fuzz of cypress and cane. Bob Kelley led a complicated social life over the marine radio. With every tow we passed he used the microphone half
as a confessional, half as a running talk show. He was one of the very few pilots on the river who were not known just as “Cap.” His voice was instantly recognized. He was a Mississippi celebrity.

“Shit, that’s Boom-Boom, ain’t it? Hi, Boom-Boom—where y’at?”

One passing pilot announced that he had left his wife the week before.

“Been catting around?” asked Kelley.

“No, she weren’t catting around. She was just going all around the town spending my money.”

“That’s the name of the game, I always heard. You earn it, then they go around spending it. You’re supposed to count yourself lucky for having all that warm pussy waiting for you.”

“Ain’t the way I look at it. I want some of what you’d call a balance in the bank, for emergencies.”

“So you’re out hunting again, I guess.”

“Reckon so—” said the voice.

“You want a kind of middle-aged one, now? Sort of sixteen … seventeen?”

“Yeah. Middle-aged. Or a year or two younger.”

“Well … Look forward to seeing you with your new one, then.”

“Yeah. Reckon she’ll be kind of dark-skinned.”

“Going after poontang, huh?”

“You know what they say … a nigger woman … she’ll stick right by you.”

“You still preaching?”

“Off and on. Occasional.”

“Why don’t you get one of them Pentecostals?”

“They got hair all over their legs.”

There was a pause and lot of crackle on the set.

“I didn’t get that,” Kelley said.

“I said—I ain’t above buying me a razor!”

Just beneath the surface of the talk there was an undercurrent of yearning and loneliness. It had the isolation of life on the river in it, of men on their own cut off from the land that was so tantalizingly close by. It caught their homesickness, their nagging jealousy and the brittle masks of humorous indifference they hid behind.

“Poor bastard,” said Kelley. “That guy, he’s had shit up to his eyes.”

“Is he really a preacher?”

“Sure. He’s a born-again.”

“He didn’t sound much like a preacher to me.”

“You should hear him when he’s in church. He speaks in tongues.”

Like me, Bob Kelley traveled with a library. In his off-watches he slept little and read a great deal. We swapped book titles and put together an anthology of our favorites. “ ‘This is the forest primeval …’ ” Kelley suddenly said, and recited a five-minute chunk of Longfellow’s
Evangeline
at the black water ahead. “You know, when you think about the Cajuns, that
Evangeline
just about says it all.”

He liked history: Jean Lafitte and the battle of New Orleans; Huey Long on the stump around Louisiana. In his cabin he kept copies of Steinbeck’s
The Grapes of Wrath
, Farrell’s
Studs Lonigan
, Caldwell’s
Tobacco Road
. They were all books that held some kind of mirror up to Bob Kelley’s own life; stories of solitude, long journeys, hard times. His closest kinfolks were these famous loners of history and fiction, and he talked about them as if they were brothers and cousins. He had tried once to settle down “on the beach”; it had been a disaster. He couldn’t fit into the regular niceties of the small town. Now, in literature, he had found characters who could cast his own brooding restlessness in a heroic light. Up in the pilothouse in the small hours, Bob Kelley and I seemed very alike.

“You’ve read
Huckleberry Finn
 …” I said.

“Only when I was a kid at school.”

“Read it again. It fits everything we’ve been saying.”

Our conversation drifted from books to the river, to marriage and on to the inevitable, compulsory topic of
Eye-ran
.

“You know, I reckon we been too good. Whenever anyone’s been in trouble in the world, we’ve gone in there to help them. Hell, we helped
you
out when you was in trouble in World War Two. Now America’s in trouble, and everyone’s looking the other way. No one wants to help
us
. Even your country, you ain’t going to come in with us and lend a hand. Even you.”

His jowl was set in a melancholy line of deep personal grievance.

“I reckon in America now, we ain’t got but one friend left in the world. Know who that is?”

“I’m sorry it’s not England.”

“South Korea.” He gave an irritable snort of laughter. “Fuckin’ South Korea!”

It was impossible to tell where America’s friendless solitude left off and Bob Kelley’s began.

John the mate came up onto the deck to relieve Bob from his watch. Bob picked up his guitar and sat beside me on the chesterfield. He picked out a couple of tentative chords, tightened a string, and sang ‘On Blueberry Hill’ very quietly. It was a performance just for himself.

There were scattered anvils of fog standing on the river. In the
searchlight beam, the shore looked like a harvested cottonfield. Bob started on another song, whispering the words and dragging out the time between the lines.

The engines underneath us were making a distant, throbbing bass accompaniment to the tune.

John, at the steering bars, joined the song with his scratchy tenor.

The three of us were singing now; all men, all a shade out of key, all to ourselves.

By sunrise, the fog had thickened and covered the river with a queer kind of architecture. There were tall arches, long galleries and recessed niches in it. The sun, breaking through, gave it the look of freshly whitewashed catacombs. We wormed our way down a corridor of open water, with the fog forming a high vault overhead. I went out on deck. Overnight we had crossed the line into subtropical America, and even in the early morning the air had a damp, bathroom warmth. Old Glory was flying on a pole behind the twin exhaust stacks. It had been eaten away and blackened by the fumes, reduced to a charred rag. Half the stripes were gone to tatters, and the decay was just beginning to reach the stars. I went back to the pilothouse for my camera and was taking photographs of it from all angles when Bob came out.

“Oh, shit! You ain’t taking pictures of my flag! Hey, I got another—let me change it. It’s a disgrace!”

“It isn’t. It’s perfect.”

Bob stared up at the ragged stump which was all that was left of his flag.

“Oh, yeah, I got you now. It’s supposed to
symbolize
something, huh? What I don’t see is why it has to be
my
flag. Hey, be kind to me. Find some other guy’s, will you?”

The fog lifted on a herd of cows nibbling at the turf on the levee. The grass was so improbably green that it looked poisonous. The cows
stamped and stared as we slid by, alarmed by our acres of rumbling steel and the high slap of our wake as it hit the narrow bank on which they grazed. I had thought we were far out in a wilderness, when we actually were trespassing on someone’s farm. Beyond the levee, a chocolate flatland of rice fields went west as far as one could see; a line of telegraph poles; a gas station on an invisible highway; and then the fine seam where the soil was joined to the sky.

We rode in a tight loop around Devil’s Swamp and headed for the labyrinthine tangle of pipes and cylinders that was the face of Baton Rouge. Bob pointed to the bridge where the city started.

“Huey done that. If that ain’t the cunningest thing … See how low it is? There’s just sixty-five feet clearance under that bridge. Huey had it all figured out. He was going to keep all the big ships down in Louisiana, see? He was out to stop the gravy going up to Mississippi and Tennessee. So Huey builds himself a real mean little bridge. You try running a big ship under there, she’d cut herself half in two. Up in Vicksburg, they was shouting their heads off when they heard about Huey’s bridge, and Huey, he was laughing fit to bust. It was like he’d built a solid wall right across the river. Hell, they don’t make ’em like the Kingfish no more. He was the sharpest, double-crossingest sonofabitch on God’s earth.”

We scraped under Governor Long’s ingenious shipping trap, and suddenly the river was jammed with great freighters and tankers. It was no place for a sixteen-foot boat. The rusty slab sides of the ships, rising as high as hotels, made even the tow feel squat and vulnerable. We threaded through pools of shadow cast by vessels out of Yokohama, Piraeus, Marseilles, London and Hong Kong. A pale young sailor at an open porthole was putting his underwear out to dry; he was getting a queer and dismal view of America—a toy Gothic castle, the old state capitol, marooned in what seemed to be a gigantic oil refinery. Baton Rouge offered very little in the way of temptation to jump ship. Nor did it seem to have any ending. It had leaked, in a diluted form, down miles and miles of river, spreading its oil and chemical plants along the levees, turning the landscape into an unlovable abstraction of wire, steel, aluminum and tarmac.

I went below. The internal life of the towboat was far more absorbing than the overintricate gray outlines of industrial Louisiana. I sat in the mess room, listening to the gossip.

“Shit, but ain’t she been married to that guy once already?”

“You know he owes the I.R.S. two million fuckin’ bucks?”

“Shee-it.”

“She’s having another baby. In March. They got two kids—two boys.”

“He’s on vacation, in Brazil or someplace.”

“She died. Leukemia. And she was only thirty-one.”

“He’s an asshole.”

“I kind of like the guy.”

“I tell you, I couldn’t give a rat’s ass for him.”

“He’s okay—”

None of them had ever met these people whose lives provided them with continuous material for talk. They knew each other too well; their own personal affairs had been exhausted as conversational topics. Their isolated existence on the tow didn’t bring them into contact with anyone else. So, like the residents of Miss Mary’s old people’s home, they pretended that they lived in the small town of Hollywood. The mess-room library consisted of stacks of old copies of the
National Enquirer
, and the magazine supplied the crew with enough nail parings from the lives of film and television stars for them to know Barbra Streisand and Roman Polanski and Howard Cosell a great deal more intimately than they knew their neighbors.

Watching TV wasn’t a passive activity, it was a participatory sport. A children’s quiz program came up.
Jokers Wild
.

“Hey, this kid here, he’s a genius kid, this one.”

“I was reading in the paper about a genius kid. You know, he could play the piano like Beethoven … stuff like that. Lives up in Nebraska. Six years old. Shit. They have genius kids like that in England, Jonathan? Have you ever met a kid like that?”

“Hey—
listen
. This I want to hear.”

“Watch him. He’s real smart.”

The host of the show was saying: “Now, what part of a tree both holds it in the earth and supplies it with most of the water that it needs?”

The camera zoomed in on the child’s face. He was squinching up his eyes as he tried to think.

John the mate said “The roots …?” and gave a nervous cough.

Time was up for the genius child. “The … leaves?”

“Come again, Gary, I didn’t hear you that time—”

“
Leaves.
”

“I’m sorry, Gary, I can’t give you that. The correct answer was the
roots.
”

“Hey!” John shouted, “you hear that? I got it! It was the roots!”

By the time we were off New Orleans it was dark, and my boat was ready to go over the side again. Bob had torn a sheet from the exercise book of lined yellow paper in which he kept his navigation notes
and was making a careful job of writing some kind of inscription on it. He folded the paper into a small square and handed it to me.

“Don’t read that now,” he said.

I opened it ten minutes later and read it by the light of a city streetlamp, with the paper dimpling in the warm rain.