On the River Styx (22 page)

He cannot bring himself to acquire more than three (
Always set an odd number
, his father had said,
in case of a lone bird
), since he would not harbor such horrors in his house, and does not intend to hunt ever again. So irritated is he by wasting money on such rubbish that he feels justified in commandeering a rain parka in its slim packet and a box of shotgun shells while he is at it.

At the cottage he finds a burlap sack for carrying and concealing the decoys, the dismantled gun, the shells, and a thermos of coffee in its leather case. That evening, he rigs a treble-hooked surf-casting lure on a length of line—a makeshift retrieval gear of his own devising.

Within a few days comes a forecast of northeast wind, with rain. Since his days are his own—the one activity left to him, now that the house is finished, is phoning for groceries, which are delivered daily—he will go hunting with the first change in the weather.

B
EARING HIS SACK
over his shoulder like a burglar, he makes his way down toward the river. In the darkness, each house is fortified by its hard pool of light, and he half expects that his flashlight, spotted at the wood edge by some nosy oldster out of bed to pee, will bring police from all directions, filling the suburban night with whirling red, white, and blue beacons—the Nigger Hunters, as the hotel clerk referred to them, conveying contempt for cops and blacks alike.

In the woods he descends wet shadow paths, his sack catching and twisting in the thorns. At the track edge he peers north and south through a grim mist that hides him entirely from the world, then crosses the railroad to the river.

He lobs the decoys out upon the current, and the wind skids them quickly to the end of their strings, which swing too far inshore. In daybreak light, in choppy water, they in no way resemble three lorn ducks yearning for the companionship of a fourth.

He yanks his blind together, scrunching low as a train sweeps past toward the city. He feels clumsy, out of place,
not nearly so well hidden as he had imagined. The upstate passengers, half-dozing in the fetid yellow light, cannot have seen him, though they stare straight at him through the grit-streaked windows. He breaks the light gun, loads two shells, and snaps it to, then sips his cup of coffee, peering outward.

As forecast, the wind is out of the northeast. Pale gulls sail past. But there is no rain, and the mist lifts, and the sun rises from the woods behind, filling the cliff faces across the river with a red-gold light.

The eerie windshine of the first day of a northeaster exposes the decoys for the poor things they are; the unnatural brightness of their anchor lines would flare a wild bird from five gunshots away. His folly is jeered at by clarion jays that cross back and forth among the yellow maples at the wood edge.

BANG

He has whirled and with a quick snap shot extinguished one of the jays, which flutters downward in the river woods like a blue leaf. He sinks back, strangely out of breath. And he is about to break his gun, retreat, slink home—he wants to drink—when there comes a small whispery sound, a small watery rush.

A black duck has landed just beyond the decoys. Struggling to make sense of its silent company, it quacks softly, turning back and forth. It rides the gray wavelets, wheat-colored head held high in wariness.

He has one shell left and no time to reload.

The gentle head switches back and forth, one eye seeking, then the other. In the imminence of the morning sun, in the wild light, the bird’s tension holds the earth together.

The duck springs from the surface with a downward buffet of the wings. In one jump it is ten feet in the air, drops of water falling, silver-lined wings stretched to the wind that will whirl it out of range.

BANG

The dark wings close. The crumpled thing falls humbly to the surface, scarcely a splash, as the echo caroms from the cliffs across the river.

In the ringing silence, the river morning is resplendent. Time resumes, and the earth breathes again.

The duck floats upside down, head underwater, red legs on the bronze-black feathers twitching.

Not a difficult shot
, his father would have said.
The trigger is squeezed when the bird levels off at the top of the jump, for just at that moment it seems almost motionless, held taut by wires
—not
a difficult shot
.

How often in his boyhood he had missed it, turning away so as not to see his father’s mouth set at the corners. Then one day he outshot his father, finishing up with a neat double, trying not to grin.

With that second barrel he had overshot his limit. He had known this but could not resist, his father’s good opinion had seemed more important. The Assistant Secretary’s nod acknowledged the fine shot, but his voice said,
You’ve always been good at things, Henry. No need to be greedy
. It was no use blustering that he had followed through the double as his father had taught him. His father had no patience with excuses.

Often his mother felt obliged to say,
Your father’s standards are so high, you see
.

When he tried to ask just what she meant, she cut him off.

She smiled.
Sometimes what I think you lack is a sense of humor
.

He whirls his retrieval rig around his head and lets it go, looping the casting plug out beyond the duck, then tugging it back across the line of drift. On the third try it catches in the tail feathers and turns the bird around before pulling free. The next two tries are rushed, the last falls short.

The current has taken the diminished thing, it is moving more rapidly now, tending offshore.

Alone on the riverbank, peering about him, he takes a deep breath and regrets it, for the breath displaces his exhilaration, drawing into his lungs intuitions of final loneliness and waste and loss. That this black duck of the coasts and rivers should be reduced to a rotting tatter in the tidal flotsam, to be pulled at by the gulls, to be gnawed by rats, is not bearable, he cannot bear it, he veers from this bitter end of things with a grunt of pain. Or is it, he wonders, the waste that he cannot bear?

Something else scares him: he dreads going home alone and empty-handed, to the life still to be lived in the finished cottage. If the hunt supper does not take place, nothing will follow.

Sooner or later, the black duck must enter an eddy and be brought ashore. Hiding the shells and thermos under the driftwood, abandoning the decoys to the river, he hurries down the tracks toward the city, gun across his shoulder.

The bird does not drift nearer, neither does it move out farther. Wind and current hold it in equilibrium, a dull dark thing like charred deadwood in the tidal water. Far
ahead, the cliffs of both shores come together at the George Washington Bridge, and beyond the high arch, the sinking skyline of the river cities.

The world is littered with these puppet dictators of ours, protecting our rich businessmen and their filthy ruination of poor countries, making obscene fortunes off the misery of the most miserable people on this earth!

The Assistant Secretary shifted his bones for a better look at his impassive son, as if he had forgotten who he was. He considered him carefully in a long mean silence.
Who do you really work for these days, Henry? What is it that you do, exactly?

I am the government liaison with the western corporations
.

And it’s your idea, I’m told, that these corporations pay these governments for the right to dump their toxic wastes in Africa
.

When his son was silent, the old man nodded.
I gather they pay you well for what you do
.

Mother says you are obliged to sell the house. I’d like to buy it
.

Absolutely not! I’d sooner sell it to Mobutu!

Didn’t you warn me once against idealism? The Cold War is not going to be won by the passive intrigues of your day
—

Stop that at once! Don’t talk as if you had standards of your own—you don’t! You’re some damn kind of moral dead man! You don’t know
who
the hell you are, and I don’t either! You probably should have been an undertaker!

The old man rummaged his newspaper. When his son sat down by him, he drew his dressing gown closer. Stricken, he said,
Forgive me. Perhaps you cannot help what you have become. I asked too much of you, your mother says, I was too
harsh
. He paused for a deep breath, then spoke shyly.
I’m sorry, Henry. Please don’t come again
.

T
HE MIST
has lifted, the sun rises.

Trudging south, he is overtaken by the heat, the early trains. In his rain parka with the stiff canvas beneath, lugging the gun, his body suffocates. It is his entire body, his whole being, that is growing angry. The trains roar past, they assail him with bad winds, faces stare stupidly. He waves them off, his curses lost in the trains’ racketing. His jaw set in an iron rage, he concentrates on each railroad tie, tie after tie.

The dead bird is fifty yards offshore, bound for the sea. In the distance, the silver bridge glints in the mist. Nearer are the cliffs at Spuyten Duyvil, where the tracks turn eastward, following the East River. Once the bird had passed that channel mouth, he could only watch as it drifted down the west shore of Manhattan.

He trots a little. He can already see the rail yard and trestle where the tracks bend away under the cliffs.

T
HERE THEY ARE
.

Perched on concrete slabs along the bank, thin dark-skinned figures turn dark heads to see this white man coming with a gun. Though the day is warm, they are wearing purple sweatshirts with sharp, pointed hoods drawn tight, as in some archaic sect in Abyssinia.

They pretend to ignore him, he ignores them, too. “Hey,” one says, more or less in greeting. Rock music goes loud then soft again as he moves past paper bags, curled orange peels.

In painted silver, the purple sweatshirts read:

LUMUMBA LIVES

On a drift log lies a silver fish, twenty pounds or more, with lateral black stripes from gills to tail. In the autumn light, the silver scales glint with tints of brass. Should he tell these Africans that this shining New World fish carries cancer-causing poison in its gut?

Beyond the Africans, on the outside of the tracks between rails and river, is a small brick relay station. The wrecked windows are boarded up with plywood, and each plywood panel is marked with a single word scrawled in harsh black:

NAM COKE RUSH

Crouched behind the station, he hides the gun under a board, slips his wallet into a crevice, then his shoulder holster. He fits a shard of brick.

The plaint of a train, from far upriver. The Africans teeter on their slabs, craning to see where he has gone. The sun disappears behind swift clouds.

He strips to his shorts and picks his way across dirtied weeds and rocks, down to the water edge.

Where an eddy has brought brown scud onto the shore lie tarred scrap wood and burnt insulation, women’s devices in pink plastic, rusted syringes, a broken chair, a large filth-matted fake-fur toy, a beheaded cat, a spent condom, a half grapefruit.

Ah shit, he says aloud, as if the sound of his own voice might be of comfort. He forces his legs into the flood, flinching in anticipation of glass shards, metal, rusty nails through splintered wood.

The hooded figures shout, waving their arms. They yell again, come running down the bank.

His chest is hollowed out, his lungs yawn mortally. He hurls himself outward, gasping as the hard cold strikes his temples, as a soft underwater shape nudges his thigh. In his thrash, he gasps up a half mouthful of the bitter water, losing his breath as he coughs it out, fighting the panic.

Rippling along his ear, the autumn water whispers of cold deeps, green-turning boulders. The river is tugging at his arms, heavy as mercury, entreating him to let go, to sink away. Through the earth’s ringing he can hear his arms splash, as the surface ear hears the far whistle of a train, as yells diminish.

Cold iron fills his chest, and desolation. It is over now—this apprehension of the end comes to him simply, as if body and soul were giving up together. The earth is taking him, he is far out on the edge, in the turning current.

The duck floats belly up, head underwater, droplets of Adirondack water pearled on the night blue of its speculum, drifting downriver from the sunny bend, from the blue mountains.

His cold hand is dull as wood on the stiffened duck.

The cold constricts him and his throw is clumsy. The effort of the throw takes too much strength. The duck slides away downstream. He swallows more water, coughs and spits, and overtakes it, rolling onto his back to get a breath.

A rock nudges him. He sees bare trees whirl on the sky. The point-head purple hoods loom up, dark faces break.

“Yo, man! Lookin good, man! You all right?”

From the shallows, he slings the duck onto the shore. He crawls onto the rocks, knocks away a hand.

“Easy, man! We tryin to help!”

“Yay man? What’s happenin? How come you jumpin in the river?”

“October, man!
Bad
river, man!”

“Never catch no
nigger
swimmin! Not out there!”

“
No
, man! Niggers
sink
! Any fool know
dat
!”

They yell with laughter.

“Niggers
sink
! Tha’s about it!”

“Goodbye cruel world, look like to me!”

“Cruel world!” another hoots, delighted. “Tha’s about it!”

His wet underwear is transparent. He feels exposed, caught in the open. Rage grasps him, but he has no strength. He fights for breath.

“Hey man? You hearin me? Next time you need duck meat bad as that, you let me know. Go walkin in the park, toss me some crumbs, noose all you want! Two bucks apiece! Yeah man! Gone give you my card!”

They laugh some more. “Gone give the man his
card
, that nigger say!”