The Same River Twice (23 page)

“Bucky,” she said. “Fire them.”

“Well, I'm afraid they already quit.”

He chuckled and Dirt began to laugh. I joined them and we left the dining room together. Bucky paid us cash and shook our hands.

“She won't stay buffaloed long,” he said to Dirt. “You better skedaddle.”

“If I get caught,” Dirt said, “I'll leave you out of it. But tell her she was aiding and abetting.”

Dirt roped my backpack to a chrome spiderweb on the motorcycle's sissy bar. He straddled the bike, kicked the starter, and I climbed on the back. He popped a wheelie and we entered the mangroves.

Twice we stopped for snakes and three times for high water. Birds were dead in the boughs of trees. With the moisture gone from the air, the sun illuminated everything with a clarity both frightening and lovely. We passed three rainbows that plunged into the swamp. Coming around a sharp curve, we surprised an alligator herding her young across the road. Dirt braked and swung to the left. As we shot by, one of the babies turned its head. For the merest fraction of a second we looked directly at each other. The little alligator seemed as surprised as I was.

A few miles farther, we stopped for a giant sea turtle slowly dragging its way along the road. Dirt broke a stick and jabbed the turtle toward the water. It left a sinuous path across the tar.

“Fucker's lost,” Dirt said

“Why'd you give me a lift?”

“I don't know. Sick of her lording it over me.”

“That wasn't a CB in my room.”

“I know. I broke in the next day. You're a sick fuck, in there talking to it.”

“Nobody else would.”

“You were a narc, you'd have left with the ranger. Let's ride. I got to split fast. I'll drop you in town.”

We roared into Florida City and stopped for gas. The town looked the same. Dirt unhooked my pack and tossed it to the blacktop.

“Give me your driver's license,” he said. “We'll swap.”

I frowned, wondering if this was a biker ritual of farewell. Since I didn't own a car, I wouldn't need it anyway.

“If she rolls over on me,” he said, “your ID'll get me by for a while. You aren't on the run, are you?”

“Not from the law.”

I handed him my license. It was from Kentucky, the last physical evidence of where I'd started. Everything else in my wallet proclaimed me merely American. Dirt straddled his bike and winked at me.

“Don't let your meat loaf,” he said.

I watched the proof of who I was drive into the street, turn a corner, and disappear. I checked his license to learn my name. Jesus Christ, I thought, no wonder he goes by Dirt. I suddenly realized that I didn't know where to go. Chris Offutt was driving away on a motorcycle. Someone else stood in a Florida ghost town beneath the terrible burden of freedom.

The old man at the bus station ignored me, as if he'd become accustomed to escapees from the swamp. He spat near a trash can.

“Do you know who I am?” I asked him.

He shook his head. I smiled and called Shadrack collect. When the operator asked who it was from, I checked the driver's license again.

“Clarence,” I said.

He refused but I broke in, saying, “It's me, it's me,” and Shad accepted the charge.

“You got room for me?” I asked.

“When?”

“Three days probably. I'm coming by bus.”

“You can stay at my dump for twelve hours.”

“That's all I could take of seeing that trash you paint.”

“I don't paint anymore, Chris. I quit to write my memoir. You'll be a key character. I don't have time for this.”

“Okay, bye.”

“Wait, Chris. There's one more thing.”

“What?”

He hung up, the oldest joke between us.

The bus north was a rumbling gray coffin, evidence of my failure, like a tamed and crippled raptor. We passed a hitchhiker and I ducked, unwilling to see the disdain on his face. Returning to Boston was the first time I'd ever gone back anywhere. For a decade my motto had been “Always Forward,” but that had taken me to a swamp and reduced me to a bus. Forward had become backwards.

I had six dollars when Shadrack met me in Boston. He kept remembering money he'd borrowed in the past, enough to keep me in cigarettes and food. He also deigned to share with me the towel I'd given him. I found work at a one-hour photo store, producing imagery before the sentiment had time to fade. Since I was the only male and the only white, customers assumed I was the manager. I quit, tired of people believing lies about me. I wasn't an actor, painter, playwright, or poet. I was just one more nondescript person on the planet. Ponce de León died from a Seminole's arrow at age sixty, still trying to live the life of a youth. I would not make his mistake. I moved into an upscale rooming house and wrote some poems.

A few months blurred by and I met a woman. Rita was a psychologist and musician. She was attractive in an honest way, rather than a gender contraption of makeup, diet soda, and designer jeans. Her body was simply her body, not kneaded by Nautilus into a sculptor's plaster form. Her eyes were enormous and in constant motion. She was far more intelligent than I. She was Calliope making do with a mortal.

Rita asked me to take her out of town, and though I'd lived in the Boston area for years, the only place I felt confident of finding was Salem. The House of Seven Gables has a secret passage that tourists can be led through for a fee. We held hands in that narrow space between the two worlds of past and present. I wanted to kiss her but the guide was hurrying us along.

Later I showed her my poetry and she told me they weren't poems but only looked like them. We had our first fight, which ended when she suggested I write prose. I taught her to drive a car, play poker, and shoot pool. Rita returned me to the species with a careful formula of protection and guidance. I ate and slept in regular patterns. I gained weight.

Within two years we moved three times, first to her hometown of Manhattan, where we were married. Rita had no brother, and her parents considered me a son. We saved some money and moved to Eastern Kentucky. My family welcomed Rita like royalty. They were pretty sure that with her around, I wouldn't wind up in prison or dead.

After a year in the hills, we had run through our savings in a failed attempt to renovate a small house, having gotten as far as adding on a bathroom. Neither of us found work. The journal had become useless, an obvious dodge. With nothing but the familiar around me, I resorted to fiction.

Rita had long urged me to go to a writing school but I refused, afraid to learn that I had no talent. Of all my imagined artistic enterprises, writing was the only one at which I'd made genuine effort. I had three stories, all written in Kentucky, on my home hill.

Broke and in debt, I applied to several graduate programs, choosing the schools on a geographical basis. Rita favored the desert of Arizona and I wanted the Montana mountains. A teacher at the local college suggested that I apply to the University of Iowa, which I did, although the prospect of living on such terrain didn't excite me. Iowa was the first to respond, with an acceptance.

A month later we took out a promissory note and rented a van. I was leaving home again, abandoning the hills. I'd never really found a place in the outside world, but had stayed away too long to fit in at home. We drove twelve hours with my stories in an envelope on my lap. The closer we got to Iowa, the worse the stories seemed. I'd had to reenter the hills to start writing, and I wondered if I'd be able to continue on flat land.

We camped by the Coralville Reservoir until we found an apartment in a condemned building beside the jail. The first year was hard and I considered leaving, an old pattern. Rita convinced me otherwise. We moved to a house by the river, where I built a small room to write in. I had my goddess. I had my temple. The prairie spread in every direction.

T
he baby is two weeks overdue, a sign of intelligence. It prefers the safety of further percolation instead of expulsion into the world of light and air, sorrow and joy. Lately it has been still, grown too large for its space. Eita's belly is an immense full moon, her navel a smudge pulled inside out. Her lovely breasts rest high on her belly. She can barely walk.

This is the last day of waiting. I slept three hours last night, anesthetized by a half-pint of bourbon. I suffer no hangover this morning, only a wide-eyed dread of a stillbirth, There is no reason to think this way; Rita is in fine health. She has not broken her ban on caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine. I feel odd for leaving her every morning but she urges me out of the house. The only time she gets full rest is when I'm gone. A faint snow filters through the sky. Mist in the trees is actually chimney smoke, held to the earth by impending weather.

The riverbank is a crouching porcupine, bare tree limbs quilling the sky. A pin oak hit by lightning hangs at a right angle like a jack-in-the-pulpit. I crouch within the overhang, a pipeless Pan, Adam before Lilith, a druid needing no specific oak. Tiny beads of snow settle into the folds of cloth at my elbow. The wilderness accepts me as an extension of itself, an arm that knows its hand. I become as old and cold as all the silent trees along the river's edge, accepting snow.

Unless birth occurs today, the hospital will induce Rita's labor tomorrow. Such a timetable is usually reserved for jobs and sporting events. Only war and birth erupt on their own, preemptive strikes of broken water and treaties.

Wind on the surface makes the river appear to flow backwards. I cup my hands and emit the barred owl's call. One answers and I don't respond, satisfied with sharing the dawn. The final countdown has begun. We are like a stakeout team breaking surveillance to catch the baby in the act.

I fear the loss of independence although I didn't do so well alone. What passed for adventure was despair, my courage actually a refusal to acknowledge fear. This arrangement of safety ends tomorrow. I will learn the vocabulary of a father—when you get older, maybe later, ask your mother.

Below the oak lies the regurgitated gray pellet of an owl. After eating its prey whole, an owl expels the bones and fur in a tidy package! This one is very hard, which means it's old. I break it open to find the flat skull of a baby snake. As a child, I was scared of snakes and I intend to teach my kid otherwise. Children are only afraid of what their parents fear, that and the parents themselves.

Beside me the river moves south to join the Cedar, pushing toward the Mississippi, flowing to the Gulf. Everything runs to the Gulf. Rita has lightened. The baby's head has wedged into the pelvic exit. Tomorrow the baby will join the earth as a trickling creek. We prepared ourselves four weeks ago in case the baby came early. Already it has fooled its folks.

I leave the woods and cross the yard to check on the boat. Months back, I pulled it into the yard to save it from the crush of ice. The boat looks bigger on land than in the water. I sit on the middle seat. Woodsmoke pushes down, swirling around me, the sign of a coming storm. The raw cry of a crow kills the silence, drawing my attention. An eagle stands on one leg in a tree, holding a bloody fish in its other claw, darting its head to rip through the scales. Crows land in nearby boughs as if paying homage to the superior hunter. They remind me of children trying to learn, and it occurs to me that fathers always seem to be of a different species.

I stay as long as I can against the cold. Tree limbs curve to the earth beneath the weight of snow. Every second brings me closer to fatherhood. I'm waiting in a boat on land, surrounded by smoke that does not rise. The river is flowing upstream.

T
he alarm clock buzzed at dawn. I fought exhaustion until the reason for such an early morning released enough adrenaline to melt dry ice. The outside air was dark as dusk. Rita's preternatural eyes gleamed, anticipating relief. Maternity and paternity possessed the supremely differing points of view of a shaman and a televangelist, a proton and an electron, a quarterback and the football itself. Neither of us could eat breakfast. Mist from the river rose to blend with snow, the earth and sky mixing in air.

I held Rita's arm as we walked to the car. The sun was beginning to rise, with the moon still hung in the west. I stood between the two companions of the planet, feeling the lure of each, the myth of both. Earth was the broker of life while the moon marked passage of time. I drove slowly, carefully. We didn't speak. At the hospital an orderly whisked Rita away in a wheelchair, her belly leading the way. Fifteen minutes later a nurse pecked my shoulder.

“Are you the acting father for Mrs. Offutt's child?”

“The husband.”

She frowned at her clipboard. “This way,” she said.

“What do you mean, acting father?”

“Birth coach.”

I followed her through an elaborate security system to the delivery room, where Rita lay connected to a coil of wires and cords. A blood pressure gauge wrapped her left arm. She wore a belt that monitored the fetus through electrodes fastened to her body. A machine charted contractions with a tiny stylus like a seismograph. The spindly IV dripped Pitocin, a hormone that would eventually trigger labor.

I asked the nurse about alternatives to Pitocin.

“Nipple stimulation sometimes helps but I'm afraid it's two weeks too late.”

“You're afraid?” I said.

From down the hall came an anguished howling. The nurse hurried away and I envisioned our neighbor having just seen the two-headed freak she'd emitted from her body. I pulled the deck of cards from our suitcase and offered Rita a cut. We played gin rummy and I won handily. Rita tried to doze. I left for a walk and discovered a herd of stark-eyed men biting lips, nails, and cuticles. One man twitched uncontrollably; another scratched his forearm with the methodic repetition of a lunatic. Conversation consisted of grunts and swallows. Eventually we were all driven away by a sweaty bastard who delivered a monologue on the three previous babies his wife had lost. If this one didn't come, he was filing for divorce.