Where the River Ends (19 page)

24

JUNE 4, MIDDAY

T
he same railroad that runs through Moniac, just twelve crow miles away, passes along the south side of St. George. The A.E. Bell Bridge spans the river at St. George and is a favorite canvas for lovers with spray paint. Purple martins nest beneath the bridge by the hundreds on their return trek north after spending the winter in Brazil. Seldom stopping to rest, they eat and drink while flying. Each one cuts the air above and below the bridge like an F-16 in search of their daily quota of horseflies, dragonflies or june beetles. Then they drop to the surface and cut the glassy water with their beaks.

Compared to Moniac, St. George is a thriving metropolis. Population might top a hundred. Grammar school, restaurant, gas station with grocery store and butcher, auto repair shop, a four-way stop marked by a flashing caution light and a burger joint called the Shack by the Track.

I cut the paddle, pulled against the stern and steered us toward the bank. We swung around the skeleton of an old wooden boat. The keel and a few stubborn ribs were all that remained. I helped her from the boat and led her around the spare tires and the ten thousand shards of green glass. Up north, people spray paint boxcars or the back of billboards. Down here, we paint water towers or the underside of bridges. Abbie walked amongst the concrete pilings and read aloud, “Pie says hie.” And, “Donna likes Robert.” She reached down and pulled a discarded can from the rocks. She shook and mashed her thumb against the stuck depressor. It sputtered then sprayed green. She walked to an empty piling, reached above her and began spraying: “Abbie loves Doss.”

She dropped the can to her feet. “You know, if you can’t say it with Krylon, then you just can’t say it.”

She stood beside me, hanging her arm inside mine. She whispered, “Remember the Guadalquivir?”

T
HE
G
UADALQUIVIR
R
IVER
in Spain is famous for several reasons. Columbus sailed it, as did Cortés, and in 1992 the World’s Fair occurred on its banks. Huge, empty buildings—once the rave of the day that promised to attract tourists the world over—now sit empty, rotting and colored with mildew and cracked paint. A monument to stupidity. The river was rerouted years ago—sending it around Seville—but the stretch that remains is still very much in use. Because it’s long, straight and has no current, Olympic crew teams come from all over the world to train year-round. A bike path, three miles long and wide enough for cars, lines one side. It’s used by runners, bikers, skateboarders, rock climbers, fishermen, crapping ducks and kids shooting heroin. Abbie had brought me here. It was one more class in my education. We’d eaten tapas, drunk a bottle of vino just up from the Torre del Oro and needed a walk. It was getting dark and didn’t look like the safest of places. I grabbed her hand. “What are we doing down here?”

We’d spent the last few weeks walking through museums. I was about museumed out. A concrete wall borders most of the river, lit by yellow streetlights that throw odd shadows across the walls. Some portions of the wall are a couple stories high and most every square inch is covered in graffiti. Huge scenes, thirty and forty feet tall and just as wide, cover long stretches. She ducked beneath an overpass and pointed. “Not all art is found in museums.”

The drug culture seems to spur much of the content, as it’s violent and has something to do with sex, somebody shooting somebody or needles and shooting up. It was angry, ripe with pain and reminded me of something I had begun to forget: escape is one of the miracles of art.

Abbie knew intuitively what I needed when I needed it. We had walked the length of it twice.

I
STEADIED HER
and helped her sit next to a concrete piling where the smell of fresh paint hung in the air. I read her green note. “Yes, I remember.”

I really wanted a hot veggie plate from the Shack by the Track, but prudence kept us hidden beneath the bridge.

With a circling tailwind, we continued past long, winding, bleached beaches, strands of mimosa trees—their purplish-pink blooms tickling the air—dogwoods, green and lush, and scrub oaks that anchored everything.

We passed beneath another railroad trestle that smelled strongly of creosote and diesel fuel, and around self-named places like Catfish Lane, Pond Fork Holler, and UGA Beach. The beaches here were longer, some a hundred yards long and covered in deer tracks and driftwood.

To the east was Conner’s A-Maize-ing Acres—a pick-your-own farm that peddled to city slickers looking for that “farm experience.” They raised pumpkins, watermelon and corn. A submerged sign in the river read “Poultry Fertilizer.”

We passed Harris Creek, Johnson Cemetery and Dunn’s Creek before passing Toledo, which is near the midpoint between St. George and Boulogne.

We passed the signature red clay of Tompkins Landing, where trash bags cluttered the bank and a man in a bathing suit lay sprawled across the sand like a beached whale. Given the number of empty Bud Light bottles strewn around him, the lobster tinge of his skin and the snoring, he’d been there awhile. The river widens here to maybe one hundred feet across. Lily pads have sprouted on the slower moving, sunlit Georgia side. At the landing, want-to-be rappers sucked on ten-cent stogies leaning against the mangled tailgate of a muddy red Toyota pickup. Tattoos, lip piercings, thick gold chains, chrome-sided sunglasses and pants worn below their buttocks seemed to be the local uniform. They paid me little notice and said nothing, so I pulled my hat down over my eyes and paddled quietly through.

I suppose that’s the next generation of river people, but they bear little resemblance to the first.

A red-tailed hawk dropped out of a tree on my right, scooped along the bank and lifted an unsuspecting squirrel out of its hole in the sand. While the squirrel barked at the top of its lungs, the hawk flapped higher, struggled with the acorn-fat, hairy rodent and then lit on a tree limb and sunk its beak into the chest cavity, at which point the screaming stopped.

Trader’s Hill was once a thriving port on the river. British and Portuguese sailors used to come this far inland to fill their casks with fresh water and rest in the cool waters. Later it served as a clearing house for lumber. There was even a treaty signed here. The U.S. and Spain signed the Treaty of San Lorenzo, or Pinckney’s Treaty, declaring that the boundary of Georgia and Florida would run to the start of the St. Marys River inside the Okefenokee. Today, Trader’s Hill provides a much-used boat ramp because it’s the first truly navigable place in the river for fishing boats and other watercraft. It’s here that the tubers, wakeboarders and Jet Skiers begin to populate the water. There’s a public phone and bathroom, camping hookups and several big blue Dumpsters covered in maggots, flies, blue-tailed skinks and fat lizards. Here, the river cuts deeper, grows bigger fish and even bigger alligators. Some as long as twelve feet. Reports say that sturgeon, too, grow here. Some as long as eight feet and weighing as much as two hundred pounds. Sightings are rare, but twice in the last year, kids on Jet Skis have been unseated and knocked unconscious by a sturgeon that wanted something its own size to play with. In both cases the kids survived, but when they woke up they had one heck of a fish story. Trader’s Hill is also the first place we began to notice the tidal influence. Meaning, if I began timing our runs, we could hitch a ride on the outgoing tide, saving energy in the process. And if timed incorrectly, it would cost me dearly as I’d have to pull against a swelling incoming tide. Lastly, and most importantly, it was here that the river became recreational.

If I had grown “uncomfortable” between Spread Oak and St. George, the hair was really raised on my back now. I just could not shake the idea that the trees had eyes.

U.S. 1 runs across the St. Marys at a little border town called Boulogne. Gas station, bait shop, lottery tickets and beer are the hot commodities. We reached the bridge at nightfall where a hundred purple martins were engaged in aerial combat. The bridge sat on huge concrete pads and pilings the size of houses. A wooden ladder hung down off the center pad. I tied off the canoe and we climbed up the ladder to the platform some ten feet off the surface of the water. Every few minutes a truck or car would drive across the metal grate, sending echoes off the water. It was dry and safe, so I carried up Abbie’s fleece sleeping bag and her towel pillow. I wrapped her up and then smelled the air. Yesterday’s rest on the beach had allowed her to store some energy in reserves. She was awake and listening. I eyed the thick white clouds on the horizon. “I think it’s gonna come a rain.”

She turned up one eye. “Come a rain?” I nodded. She slid both hands under her face and pulled her knees up. “Where did you learn to talk?”

I pointed upriver. “About fifty miles that way.”

A raised eyebrow. “Well, you can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.”

Under the bridge, some local artist had written
REPENT—JESUS IS COMING SOON
and
FOR A GOOD TIME CALL RHONDA,
and then given her phone number with extension. On the bank, a thigh-thick wisteria vine climbed up the underside of the bridge where it met a Confederate jasmine that had come up from the other side. Both were in bloom and draping us in fragrance. Dozens of honeybees and five feisty hummingbirds flew from one bloom to the next, sucking in the nectar.

For us, U.S. 1 was significant. I stretched out alongside Abbie and took her into my arms. “Guess what?”

“What?”

“We’re halfway.”

25

S
ix years passed. Abbie handpicked only the design jobs she wanted her name associated with. I supported her, helped her manage a sometimes insane schedule and continued to dust off the canvas. Somewhere in there I bought a twenty-two-foot Hewes flats boat and taught Abbie how to bait her own hook. While Abbie had tried to put modeling behind her, it simply wouldn’t go away. Unlike other teen-wonder models, Abbie aged beautifully, so New York kept calling. Occasionally, she’d accept a job if it meant a getaway for us. Given her success in two careers, we couldn’t go out in public—at least in Charleston—without feeling like we were on display. Our boat,
The Empty Canvas,
became our escape. We’d motor back up into the flats or beach it on Deweese Island and disappear. Oftentimes, we’d overnight beneath the stars. I outfitted Abbie in her own fishing getup. Wide-brimmed hat, vest, she took to a fly rod like Brad Pitt in
A River Runs Through It.
Give her a flood tide and she’d spend all afternoon sight-fishing for reds. I’d stand on the poling platform, push us in close, point out the fins poking up through the water’s surface, and she’d throw right on top of them. She’d roll the line, drop the fly and slowly pull the retrieve. I loved to hear her hook up, hear the bail peeling itself empty and then hear her howl at the top of her lungs as the fish headed for deep water. For Abbie, “wet a line” meant standing in knee-deep water and sight-casting.

Seems like I blinked and we celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary. Abbie had established herself as the premier designer in Charleston, which meant South Carolina. I quit guiding, began painting full-time, she decorated her studio with my art and once a month when her body told her it was “right now” time, we snuck away and tried to start a family.

It was better than Camelot.

Then we flew to New York for what we thought was a routine shoot. Some cosmetic line needed her face and shoulders. So we spent the day shopping and gazing at polar bears.

It was spring, most of Central Park was a wave of color and powdered in pollen. Ducks, birds, cyclists, double strollers, runners and lovers were everywhere. We had stolen a few hours between photo shoots and were shopping somewhere on Fifth Avenue. One of those high-dollar stores Abbie dreamed about and the kind I couldn’t wait to get out of. Abbie leaned against the counter, sprayed some perfume onto a small sheet of paper, waved it dry, then held it to my nose. My nose has never been really good at smelling much of anything, so she was excited to have found something I not only could smell but liked. I paid the man, we walked across to the park, bought ice cream and spent the rest of the afternoon staring through the four-inch glass wall watching the polar bears swim. Every now and then someone would ask her for an autograph. Eventually, a small crowd gathered, so we slipped away and wandered the park, passing Balto and the brick fountain where Stuart Little flew his plane into the hawk.

Later that night, we found it.

Abbie had finished shooting and met me at the Ritz. We had a suite on the club floor that overlooked the park. I had just finished running and we were getting ready. Dinner at the Spice Market followed by the 8 p.m. of
Les Misérables.
I untied my running shoes and found her in the tub. She turned, lifted her hair off her shoulders and lifted the bar of soap above her head. “Wash my back.”

After ten years of marriage, I didn’t need a translator. It meant,
Wash my back, rub my shoulders, take that little pumice thing and rub the rough spots off my feet, then leave me alone. But only after you refill the tub with hot water. And if you’re good, and don’t turn this into something else, I’ll let you shave my legs.

Abbie wasn’t selfish about much, except this. Tub time was her time. She might as well have hung a No Trespassing sign across the bathroom door. No matter how seductive the whole wet, bubbly, sweaty, hair pulled up picture might look. I sat on the edge and scrubbed her back. Abbie’s problem is that she’s a lot like a dog. When she doesn’t want you to stop, she’ll find places that don’t itch.

I don’t guess you need me to paint you a picture.

A little while later, we sat in the tub, having missed our dinner reservation and chances were slim for the show. I refilled the hot water and she lay back against me.

While the steam and heat spoke to us, I wrapped my arms around her waist. Her back to my chest. She placed my finger on her temple and said without a sound
Trace me.
So I did.

And there it was.

Just beneath the nipple on her left side. I pretended not to notice, but later that night, after the show, there it was again. There in the glow of the clock, my face betrayed me. She slipped her hand beneath mine, her face drained white and fear bubbled back up. And for some reason, amidst all the fear and horror of the months to come, when I look back on that moment, I remember smelling that perfume.

W
E FLEW HOME
the next day and her mammogram was the following morning. They took the pictures, brought her back to the waiting room and Abbie sat next to me, legs crossed, and quiet.

Twenty minutes later, three doctors walked in. Given Abbie’s high profile, the hospital assigned us a team of three doctors. The senior doctor, Dr. Ruddy Hampton, was what you might think. Gray hair and a reassuring bedside manner. The other two, Dr. Roy Smith and Dr. Katherine Meyer, were younger and credited as being on the cutting edge of knowledge and technology.

They hung Abbie’s images on the wall behind us and, for reference, hung up prints from a set of disease-free breasts. We didn’t need the diagnosis. Dr. Hampton spoke first, “Abbie…” He pointed at the picture with a pencil. “These pictures confirm invasive ductile carcinoma.” The clusters he circled looked like miniature Milky Ways. He drew imaginary lines on the films and said, “These are what we call satellite lesions. In English, this means that your cancer has invaded the milk ducts.” As he spoke, I wrestled with the term
your cancer.

While he explained the films, I realized that the bump I felt was just one of many, and even worse, it had spread to both breasts. If you doubt that cancer is evil, then why does it start in the milk ducts? Answer that. Abbie studied the films and turned her head sideways. “It looks like someone shot both my breasts with white paintballs.”

Dr. Smith continued, “In oncology, there are three ways to attack cancer: surgery, chemotherapy and radiation.”

Abbie interrupted. “Don’t you call that ‘slash, poison and burn’?”

He nodded. “Yes, but here’s what’s important for you two.” He looked at Abbie. “We can address your particular situation with just chemotherapy and surgery.” That’s when I clued in to the fact that they intended to cut on my wife.

I scratched my head. “How’s that?”

Dr. Meyer broke in. “Abbie needs a double mastectomy in order to give her the best chance.”

“The best chance of what?”

“Beating this.”

Somewhere in there, it struck me that the three of them were drawing a distinction between life and death.

Dr. Hampton had been quiet, but given the awkward silence, he spoke up. “This is an
advanced
form of cancer.”

The word
advanced
floated around the room. Dr. Smith continued, “Before surgery, we will want to administer a strong and aggressive dose of chemotherapy—to shrink the tumors prior to surgery. Another aggressive course of chemo would follow—just to make certain.”

“Will it get rid of the cancer?”

Everybody nodded. “Survival rate is ninety-seven percent.”

I looked at the three doctors looking at us. “What about the other three percent?”

They reassured me, “We caught it in time. We’ll look at the lymph nodes and make sure our margins are clear, but I wouldn’t lose sleep over it.”

Lose sleep?
I wasn’t worried about losing sleep. I was worried about losing my wife.

After outlining some breast reconstruction options, they left us alone in the room. “Honey. I’m so sorry. Maybe we should get a second opinion. I mean, they don’t know everything.”

She nodded, but there was no agreement in it. I compared the two sets of films.

We didn’t need a second opinion.

She pressed her forehead to mine. “I’m glad you’re in my corner.”

“I wish I had a magic wand.”

“Me too.”