Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) (41 page)

I said no. He got hold of my arm and pulled me down a path to other sycamores whose trunks had been scratched and had grown out wartily around the scars. They looked like lovers’ initials to me. He said they were Comanche treasure maps, if he could only read them. I repeated that I was pretty ignorant. Disgustedly, he said he could see that, now.…

It was a queer place, with good springs flowing out of the hillside over humps of soft travertine, and volcanic rocks strewn about. He said somebody else had called them volcanic once, a crazy old bird that drifted up and down looking for treasure. He said it was a God-damn lie.

“Why?”

“Because, neighbor,” he said with patience, belching, “hit don’t say nothin’ in Scripture about no volcanoes in the Newnited States, and you know it.”

I said I guessed it didn’t, and asked again about the telephone.

“Oh, they’s one up at the grocery store,” he said. But before I got away he showed me other treasure maps on some black-walnut trees, and told me how the proposed Bee Mountain dam just down the river was going to put him in the boat business and make him rich, and gave me an account of how he’d come to quit liquor. It was very interesting, especially in relation to the smell of his breath.

“Used to drank whisky,” he said. “Lots of it. I mean lots. But you know what?”

“What?”

“I woke up one mornin’ over in a bar ditch on the Tolar road,” he said. “Don’t know how I come to git there. I was a-sleepin’ in the dew, and what do you reckon they was under my right foot?”

I admitted more ignorance.

“A live God-damn possum!” he said. “A-lookin’ at me, that son of a bitch. By God, that done it, neighbor. I quit.”

In the ser sta gro up the road, a one-pumper, two women were watching television beside a blistering-hot oil burner made out of blued, thin, stovepipe steel. One of them, old, sat in a wheel chair sucking snuff, with a can that had once held Hunt’s peaches perched on the foot rest. The other without rising turned down the loud machine to hear me and said yes, it was there on that shelf—and so it was, among boxes of detergent. I put through a call to Davis collect, and the women said no further word, though they kept the set tuned down during the time I was at the telephone, their eyes remaining on the bright screen. A young man’s wide-mouthed face filled it. He sang how the cats was a-rockin’ and that wasn’t all.… Then the camera turned onto three young couples on a dance floor in bright high-school clothing, solemn over the African intricacies of their step. On the shelves of the store the stock was of the kind they usually have, dust-fuzzed and fly-specked: canned goods, soap, combs, bologna and margarine and cheese and lard in a refrigerator case, men’s handkerchiefs, razor blades, lipstick, a glass case of candy.…

Davis said he’d come. I hung up, and immediately the younger woman twirled up the machine’s sound. I offered to pay for using the phone.

“No, you don’t owe me nothin’,” she said without looking at me.

I thanked her. The old woman in the wheel chair, with a dried, resigned, tragically strong face of the kind that Spanish peasant women sometimes have, had not to my knowledge glanced my way once, and as I left she leaned over to
spit with amber exactness into her peach can, without removing her eyes for a second from the fascination of that adolescent dance, the fascination of the future.…

D
AVIS CAME
in a green pickup truck with a flat-topped arch of galvanized pipe on its rear that would support the stern of the canoe. I was tired and shivery despite a heater in the truck, and when after an hour’s driving to the northeast we hit wet territory, I bought a pint of good whisky and we drank some of it, sipping salty chaser water from my canteen, and stopped to eat hamburgers at a neon-bright drive-in. The pup was asleep in my lap, a hot lump.

Davis didn’t think much of anyone’s having spent three weeks and more alone in a boat on the river. Because he liked me and was maybe a little proud that I’d done anything so crazy, he put his disapproval softly, but he said the trip didn’t make much sense to him.

“Should of drownded,” he said. “You know what that river’s like?”

I guessed I did, a little.

“Shoo,” Davis said. “I’ll take White Bluff Creek, me. They wouldn’t of found no more’n that boat, and maybe a big fat catfish somewheres that ate you up when you got good and rotten.”

I said: “Davis, you’re a worse parochial than I am.”

“A who?”

“Maybe not,” I said. “You’re a good man, anyhow.”

“You’re all right, too,” he said with a little of the abashment that the gentler emotions rouse in him. “Just the same, hit didn’t make no sense.”

Before he got me home I was dozing in the warm cab’s corner, the pup snuffling in his sleep across my legs.…

“ALL BY YOURSELF?” somebody’s wife asked at a party in town. “You didn’t get lonesome?”

I liked her and had known her all my younger life, as I had most of the other people in the room. But it was a good place to be, and the thermostat on the wall was set at seventy-five degrees, and outside the windows the cold sleet mixed with rain was driving down at a hard slant, and far far up above all of it in the unalive silent cold of space some new chunk of metal with a name, man-shaped, was spinning in symbolism, they said, of ultimate change. In that place the stark pleasures of aloneness and unchangingness and what a river meant did not somehow seem to be very explicable.

Somebody’s wife was waiting for an answer.

“Not exactly,” I said. “I had a dog.”

Goodbye to a River
doesn’t lay claim to solid scholarliness, but a good many of the things in it came to me from other people’s writings. Some of those writings I read so long ago that I no longer remember what they were, even if their content grains the tissue of my thinking. Others I have consulted and reconsulted, so that to mention them is only honorable. Footnotes seemed not to go with the tone of the book, though where a debt is heavy I’ve sometimes mentioned a source in the text itself. A few of the books provided mainly peripheral background, among them some with merited fame and currency. The rest are of differing kinds and worth, the ragged records of a region. All helped.

My debts directly to persons rather than to books are so numerous and go back over such a stretch of years that there isn’t much point in trying to make a list. I would like specifically to mention Fred Cotten, historian and antiquary, who was generous with his knowledge of the facts and ways of the Brazos country.