CHAPTER NINETEEN

Two hours later I stand on the bank of an estuary that feeds into the Ohio river. The surrounding trees and setting sun cover the forest glen and water in deep shadows. The rental car is disappearing beneath the surface of the water.

Using a branch, I do my best to erase the tire tracks leading to the water’s edge. The Willow Island Lock and Dam is only a mile away through the forest. Picking up my jacket, gym bag, and water jug, I hurry through the woods while there is still enough light to see my way. The pistol is tucked into its holster on my waistband. I have been in men and women, even children, when they were shot. I know the pain and the savage damage done to the body, yet I feel it prudent to keep the gun. The implications of using it are deliberately repressed.

The darkness becomes twilight as I break out into a meadow. Like whitened bones, the bare trunks of heat-killed trees dot the meadow. A hot fire had come through some time ago, leaving a graveyard. The light is sufficient for me to glance at my wrist. There is no watch, just habit.

An unbidden memory surfaces. I saw my first clock in Antwerp in 1581. Marvels of mechanical mechanism, inconsiderate bastard machines, little did we know that the tyranny of time, the hour, the minute, and the second were being introduced.

Now that I have broken the seal on my past, these memories flit about in my subconscious, anxious to push themselves forward. I am more like a normal human now, where a scent, a tune, or simple nostalgia provokes the retrieval of memories. One can make a shopping list of the many different types of memory cues. I have often experienced these cues in my carriers, but not in myself.

The sounds of the lock come to me first. The clanging of metal against wood, the shrillness of a whistle, the murmur of voices. The quay along the river bank is made of poured concrete. Two towboats and their brood of barges are drawn up to the side, secured by lines. Another towboat moves slowly past, its powerful spotlights sweeping the river as it heads into the lock.

The air is a mixture of the scent of diesel and the smell of river, tangy with a touch of vegetation decay. The river provokes a memory. Not my memory, but that of a person that I once touched in Toronto in 1851.

Billy Motubo, captured as a youth on the Gold Coast, was smuggled into Texas after the slave trade was supposed to be over. He tried to escape and received the raised ridges of lash scars across his back as a punishment. The overseer ordered him to take one of the other slaves as a wife, but he spilled his seed on the ground rather than make her pregnant. He knew that he could never leave children behind.

He fled once more and spent days creeping northward, catching fish in streams and rivers that he ate raw, since a fire might attract attention. On the grand old river, the Mississippi, he watched stern-wheel steamboats go past, decks crammed with bales of cotton. He yearned to hide among those bales, as he often hid among the cotton fields, but the paddlewheels were usually heading south toward New Orleans.

Finally, he made it to Canada, where he worked in the fields as a laborer. Similar work, though the dry Texas heat was gone, but at least he was paid in coins. In the evenings, he struggled to learn to read, and I helped him. He had a fire of righteous ambition in him that endeared him to me. Before I left him, I gave him enough money to book passage back to Africa. I do not know what happened to Billy Motubo, whether he returned to his tribe on the Gold Coast, or settled in Liberia. And now I was running too, finding refuge in the south instead of the north.

The forest comes directly up to the quay. I carefully examine the lock from behind the cover of a tree. The control room is lit up and I can see two people in it, one working the controls while the other writes in a log. There do not seem to be any police or other uniforms about. A middle-aged woman is walking towards the lock, her work boots making her steps heavy. As she passes, I reach out to touch her.

“Oh, excuse me,” I mutter, ducking my head.

She looks at me with confusion on her face, but continues on her way with my fragmental inside her.

I withdraw back into the shelter of the tree.

* * * *

Rose Gardner walked along the quay, grateful that this isolated lock had no nearby businesses. No taverns, no liquor stores, not even a convenience store that sold beer. She didn’t care for beer much anyway. Too mild.

When a young woman emerged from the trees, she was startled, but she did not jump back at the touch. The damage from alcohol had robbed her of her reflexes. Nine years, six months, and three days since her last drink, but she knew that her nervous system was permanently crippled.

She took her first sip when she was eleven. Her mother was in her own drink-induced haze, and her father was on the river. It was just a little sip, but straight vodka caused her to vomit. Her mother whipped her when she found out, but Rose persisted. When she was twelve, she got drunk for the first time; at thirteen, the blackouts started. Her teens and twenties were a blur in her memories. Her mother died in a car accident sometime during those years, killed by a drunk driver, ironically enough.

After several attempts at rehab, her father stepped back into her life. He dragged her aboard his towboat and would not allow her to leave. As imaginary spiders crawled over her skin and the shakes made the world around her vibrate, she contemplated jumping overboard and swimming for those beckoning lights on the shore. But she could not swim and her fear of the water was stronger than her need for a drink. She thought about suicide, but a Gardner never took the easy route; contrariness was in their genes.

So she came to love her father’s boat, and even him, a little anyway. She was named after the boat, the Rose Marie. Two hundred and six feet long, forty-eight foot beam, almost four thousand horsepower from quad diesel engines. A towboat, a silly name, since all towboats actually pushed their flocks of barges. She was proud of this boat, and after her father died and she assumed ownership, it became her home. She did not have a base on land, and even stayed on the boat during dry dock inspections and maintenance. No liquor was allowed on the boat. Any crewman who violated this rule saw his drink spilled into the river and was put ashore at the next lock.

This was a long run, bringing a load of concrete culvert pipes from a factory in Pittsburgh down to New Orleans. There was paperwork at this lock, which she quickly disposed of. Returning back up the quay, she saw the young woman again. Long blonde hair, unlike the short-cropped gray hairs on Rose’s own head.

The woman smiled at her and held out her hand. Confused, thinking that a stranger wanted to shake her hand, Rose reached out to touch me.

* * * *

This is the perfect path for escape. After a quick exchange of information, I watch the towboat captain continue on her way. Rose Gardner is a strong woman, and I admire strength when it is built on top of weakness. A fragmental is in her to provide me with extra protection.

Retrieving my bag and jug of water, I follow at a discrete distance. The Rose Marie is pushing fifteen barges, arranged three across. I pick a barge on the second row from the front. A hawser secures the barge to the quay to prevent drifting. A tarp covers the cargo so that rain will run off the tarp, not into the barge.

Normally, the towboat had powerful searchlights turned on to scan the barges and the river ahead, but they are turned off, so I am in shadow. Tossing my pack and the water jug across, I grab hold of the hawser and inch myself across, hanging like a insect under a twig. My arms and legs complain from the unusual activity as the brain rediscovers muscles long unused.

Only ten feet, but my arms are shaking when I crawl onto the tarp. No time to rest, the tugboat in front has already entered the lock. The whine of the lock machinery, shivers of high notes, echoes across the water.

The concrete culverts are some six feet wide and the same high. They are arranged vertically, with the tarp draped over them like a tent. I crawl over the circular bumps and collect my bag and jug, then I return to the edge of the tarp. There is room to slip in under the tarp and down inside the gunwale of the barge.

The tarp is loose enough so that I can climb over the lip of a culvert and down inside. This will be my home for a while. Wrapping myself inside my jacket, I settle down to sleep, even though I know that my memories wait for me, like a prosecutor. I am so exhausted, and it is six days to Memphis.