OUR NEXT HOT DATE was on the Broad Street bridge. This is where you can get the best view of the Genesee. I know our river isn't the Nile or the Amazon, but for me it has a power. Especially seen from the bridge. The gorge walls are cold raw stone. Old brick buildings crowd along the upper banks. The water is gray and fierce and forever.
Looking across the river, Relly pointed out to me the great statue of Hermes that jutted against the winter sky. The ancient copper god was way up there, on top of a stone spire, reaching heavenward, running due north like the river itself. "Over twenty feet tall," Relly said. It had been there, off and on, for over a hundred years. First, looming above some factory in the way-olden days. In the early '50s it got taken down when they did urban renewal. Later on, it was retrieved from its storage place and lifted back up to stand guard over the city, the river, the bridge.
Relly knew all about it. He did research at the library, which was just across the river, in plain sight of Hermes. He'd spent time in the local-history room, digging through old files of newspaper clippings. "They keep calling him Mercury in the paper," Relly said. "But the real name is Hermes."
"They brought him back in November of 1974. Think about it. Zeppelin was ruling the universe then. Black Sabbath, too, Judas Priest and Blue Oyster Cult, all the old metal gods. They brought him down from the sky and fastened him there at the top of that tower. He weighs seven hundred pounds. That's heavy metal."
Beneath us flowed the river, full of clotted ice and logs stripped bare of their bark, wreckage from a hundred miles upstream. "X marks the spot," Relly said. "This was where the canal once went. Did you know that? The Erie Canal ran right here. It flowed over an aqueduct, east-west canal crossing the north-south river. And who should be reigning, watching, standing above that place but Hermes himself."
Yeah, it was all pseudomystical crot from the pit of Relly's brain. I mean, the facts were right. But what he made out of them was his typical bizarro story.
"This is the place," he said. Calm, matter of fact. "Right here. This is your place, Zee. Where the canal crosses the river. And Hermes reigns above." His voice changed, like he was reading from some old book of spells. "Where the ghost of water crosses the north-flowing stream and the Winged God stands supreme."
I ignored the mystical stuff, at least for a little while. "The canal went right here?" I asked.
"Yeah. They just added another layer to the aqueduct when they turned it into a bridge. If you look from the Court Street bridge"—which was the next one upriver—"you can see it's different. Layers of stone, different layers of time."
We looked toward the library, which was built on the edge of the river. Water poured out from underneath, into the gorge. Eleven arched spillways. "The river goes right below. There's places in the basement of the library where you can lift up these manhole covers and there's the river, black and secret."
Water, water, water. Lost canals over rivers that ran under buildings. Hidden streams. Falls and rapids.
"This is the place, Zee. Here's where it will all come to an end."