CURRENT

21

JORGE LUIS Borges wrote that there are only four plots in all of literature. The story of the love of two people, the love of three people, the struggle for power, and the journey. I feel as if I have been through the stories of love and the struggles for power. Now it is time once again for the journey.

My teacher John Gardner reduced it to two: You go on a journey or the stranger comes to town.

Or as Stanley Elkin said about science fiction: You go there or they come here.

In any case the journey figures in.

I’m thinking about this while I’m listening to Bix Beiderbecke. We’re approaching his hometown of Davenport, Iowa, and “Riverboat Shuffle” is playing on my laptop. I’m thinking about the sweet sound of Bix’s solo when the song switches to a lively “It’s a treat to beat your feet on the Mississippi Mud. What a dance, do they do, people look around and I’m telling you…” Jerry’s snapping his fingers and Tom’s grooving to the beat.

The tempo shifts to “Slow River” as elegant Victorian houses rise above the floodplain on the hillside. There’s a hint of old money and better days here. “Slow River” is a lazier tune than “Mississippi Mud,” but it’s still high-pitched and breezy. No blues, no heartbreak here. Bix plays a soft, playful horn, reminiscent of an adolescent boy’s voice, just starting to deepen, still cracking from time to time.

He was a white boy with a horn, and like many of his great black contemporaries, he couldn’t read a note. He was a piano prodigy, but for some ungodly reason, at least in his own family’s view, he was drawn to the river and its jazz. He was born the year after my father, and if Bix had lived past the age of thirty, I’m wondering what he might have done. I’m sure my father heard him play at the “black and tans” on the South Side or with the Wolverines on the Indiana Dunes.

But no matter how far Bix wandered from Davenport, the river was in his blood. At the turn of the century when he was a boy, “steamboat fever” was all the rage. Mark Twain published his Life on the Mississippi in 1883 and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn two years later. In the 1890s the Streckfus family, one of the biggest names in steamboats, settled across the river from Davenport in Rock Island, Illinois, but Streckfus men tended to marry Davenport women and Davenport was considered to be a gracious, cultured place. The city soon became home to Streckfus Steamboats, a line of excursion boats that, along with its moonlight cruises, offered jazz.

When Bix was a boy, these steamers docked at night off Davenport and hot music reverberated off the decks, up and down the river. No one knows for certain when Bix Beiderbecke first heard hot music played; if he wandered down to the shore when steamers were there. But one thing is certain. When Bix was fifteen, his brother, Charles, returning from World War I, brought home a recording of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. From then on “Tiger Rag” and “Skeleton Jungle” rocked the sedate Beiderbecke home.

Down in New Orleans, Captain John Streckfus, an amateur musician himself, hired a man named Fate Marable to put together a river band. Searching for talent, Marable paused one day on the corner of Rampart and Perdido, where he listened to an illiterate street musician and hired him on the spot. To play with Marable’s band, Louis Armstrong had to learn to read notes, which he forced himself to do, though basically Louis always played by ear. He blew on the trumpet with Marable’s band as it traveled as far north as Pittsburgh and Davenport. Some have speculated, based on Bix’s sound, that he and Louis Armstrong must have crossed paths.

By listening, Bix learned to play. Though he couldn’t read music, he amazed listeners with what he could do with that horn. As a jazz friend once said, Bix played like a black boy, but he was white and the crackers could listen to him and feel okay. It’s hard to know just how the music came to him. It just did, though his father never approved.

His parents believed that music was for church and community gatherings and they sent him to the Lake Forest Academy, just a stone’s throw in Illinois from where I grew up, so Bix could get some discipline and a good education. Instead, Bix got his education on the South Side of Chicago, where he went night after night to listen and blow on his horn. He started recording and, dutifully, he sent his records to his parents. A few years later when he was dying of alcoholism, Bix returned to his family’s home. He found all of his records in a closet. They had never been opened.

Davenport is famous for other things. The first railroad bridge over the Mississippi was built here in 1856 though it was almost immediately struck by a steamboat and collapsed. The first chiropractic adjustment was performed in 1895 in Davenport by D. D. Palmer on Harvey Lillard, who claimed it restored his hearing. And Dred Scott, the famous slave who sued for his freedom, lived on Second Street with his wife, Harriet. In fact there are so many historic buildings that one has a placard that reads ON THIS LOCATION IN 1897 NOTHING HAPPENED.

But I’m on a Bix pilgrimage. We dock at the Lindsay Park Yacht Club for fuel and a pump out and I head off on a shopping expedition. At a grocery store nearby I purchase steaks, chicken, bratwursts for the freezer. Green beans and corn. I see that they’ve got something called hedge balls on sale with the pumpkins and the gourds for sixty-nine cents apiece. It’s a weird shade of lime with wrinkled skin and I have to dodge them on my walks through Prospect Park in Brooklyn. My husband likes to smash them into trees. I’ve been passing up a gold mine.

I drop my groceries back at the boat, then amble through the town of East Davenport. It is a quaint town with ice-cream shops and little cafés. An old-fashioned candy store sells penny candy. When Kate was small and we spent our summers in Vermont, we always bought penny candy from a general store. She’d take a paper sack and fill it with candy on her own. Now I pick out gummy bears, cinnamon balls, button candy, chocolate coins. I buy a pound and have it shipped to my daughter at school.

After the fuel up and pump out, we move the boat half a mile downriver where a friend of Jerry’s named Wakim has a boat shop on the levee. Wakim has told us we are welcome to tie up there for the night. The boat shop is filled with huge boats in slings, having their hulls polished, holes repaired. Someone who works in the boat shop is waiting for us. We learn that not only can we tie up for the night but they’ve left the keys to a pickup truck. We can go shopping.

But I’m going to spend the day searching for Bix and the night at a hotel, which I booked for some reason on the outskirts of town. Tom agrees to drop me off at the hotel. We drive quickly out of town along Highway 61—an ancient American route—now home to strip malls. We pass the Wal-Marts and Walgreens, a Target and Home Depot. One warehouse store after another.

Clearly I’m in the heartland now. Giant billboards loom. One displays a complacent-looking fetus and huge letters that read LIFE BEGINS AT CONCEPTION. A big black one says ONE NATION UNDER ME, SIGNED GOD. A bumper sticker reads JESUS DRIVES THIS TRUCK.

*   *   *

I’ve always rather enjoyed cemeteries. In fact I’m wishing my father was buried in one instead of sitting in a black plastic box behind my piano, but that’s another story. In college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I liked to read in the Mount Auburn Cemetery. In Los Angeles I enjoyed a drive around Forest Lawn and wondered if Gene Autry was really buried with his horse. I’ve had some good times at the Greenwood Cemetery near my house in Brooklyn. All in all I find cemeteries restful places to be, for the living and the dead.

The Oakland Cemetery is a place of rolling hills and huge plots of old Davenport families. But after walking around in the blazing sun for almost an hour, going up and down hills, past statues of sad little angels and bubbling fountains, I can’t find Bix’s grave. There is a sign at the office that says if the office is closed I should call Doug. And a number. I guess this means if a loved one dies on the weekend or at night, this is whom you phone.

I call the number and a man with a deep voice answers. I’m immediately embarrassed. I’ve had my share of funeral operators lately, those who traffic in the dead, and I feel their sacrifice is underappreciated. I want to say, “this is not an emergency,” but then is death ever? Instead I tell the man on the other end that I am looking for a grave. “Bix…” I stumble. “The cornet player. Bix Beiderbecke.”

I fear I am having an “Alas, poor Yorick” moment. Never having spoken to a gravedigger before, I’m nervous and mispronounce the last name as “Biderbeck,” but Doug corrects me. “You mean Beiderbecke.”

“Yes,” I say. Obviously he’s been asked this question before. I tell him where I am in the cemetery (at the base of a hill near a large headstone for someone named Davenport) and he instructs me to go past the pond, back up the hill. Look on my right. I follow Doug’s instructions and in a few moments come upon the large family memorial Beiderbecke. On the ground the smaller headstone: LEON “BIX” BEIDERBECKE 1903–1931.

He lived twenty-eight years and became, as so many jazz performers did who died young from drugs and alcohol, a legend. At his grave is a bouquet of plastic purple violets, a small painting of a man at a piano with the word Stardust across the painting, and a homemade sign that reads “Bix Bix Bix.” Other than this, the grave is unadorned.

Bix is buried with the same family who refused to listen to his records, beside his mother, father, sister, and brother and dozens of other Beiderbeckes who never listened to his music or cared for him or the life he led. He would be astonished to know that an annual “Bix Lives” July festival is one of the things that keeps Davenport on the map.

I pay my homage, then pass by the old Coliseum Ballroom, where such jazz legends as Bix and Louis Armstrong and Guy Lombardo played. It’s a yellow stucco building with high arches at the entryway, and I walk into this dark old ballroom with a wooden stage and balcony of wooden seats. The “Col” has been taken over by a Mexican American organization and a group of girls with long black hair and budding breasts are preparing for a quinceaños celebration.

They pay no attention to me as I wander through the wood-paneled ballroom. Posters of great jazz performances cover the walls. The Hispanic girls are lined up with their arms raised. First they form an arch under which the girl being honored will pass. Then they break into dance. Music blares from their boom box. But I think if I close my eyes and pretend the macarena isn’t playing, I’ll hear another tune.

A big band in full tux plugs away. Someone wild is at the keyboard. A high-pitched trumpet comes in for a chorus or two of “Davenport Blues.” I look up on that stage and see Bix, pants too short, white socks showing, raising his horn. The bathtub gin flows. The cops with cash in their pockets look away. Or lean their backs against the wall to listen. A sweet, sweet sound fills the room.

The Beiderbecke family home, a big white (though now with yellow trim) Victorian, is at 1934 Grand Street and I ask the cab I’ve hired to take me there. We drive up to an ordinary house on an ordinary street with a public school across the street that Bix attended. Out front a woman tends her bed of annuals. She’s got a trowel and she’s pulling up weeds. As we pull up, she looks at me and I can tell she is used to this. People make pilgrimages here all the time. I get out and stand in front of her house and she keeps planting her annuals.

How did this happen? I ask myself as I gaze at the tidy home, the front porch swing. How did this house and this street produce this man? I recalled my own rebellions, my desire to get away. I tried to flee when I went to college, but I’ve carried on my own tug of war with home. I am reminded of a neighbor of mine who broke her arm. She seemed calm as she was taken to the emergency room, but on the forms she wrote down the address of the house she grew up in where she hadn’t set foot in forty years.

For years after we moved out of my childhood home, I had dreams of that house. They are always more or less the same. I am walking somewhere—in a jungle, down a Paris street or a country road. Suddenly it starts to snow. In the snow there are footsteps. I follow them and they lead me home.

*   *   *

When my father was born in the fall of 1902, Chicago still had a great deal of prairie. I like to imagine my father playing in empty lots of wheatgrass, blowing as the clouds drifted across the open sky. But once I asked him what it was like and he told me that the prairie was brown, windy, and dry. When his brother, Sidney, was born, he remembered running across it to the next neighbor. Where he ran is now Rogers Park.

As a child I pretended I was a pioneer girl. I had a dozen brothers, never sisters, who were always being wounded or shot. I was the only one who could remove an arrowhead, heal a wound. I found the paths no one could find. I blazed the trail and brought deer meat home on my back. The truth was I never liked being inside very much. I was desperate to get away.

It was not a happy home. But our misery was a private one, nothing anyone ever showed to the world. My childhood was a minefield I navigated with mixed results. To my father everything was a lethal weapon. A pencil, a kitchen knife, a drinking glass could all become the instruments of my demise. If I walked with a sharpened pencil, I risked tripping over some unseen object and stabbing myself in the eye. Kitchen knives could mysteriously be launched. A glass could fly out of your hand and smash into your skull.

It was rare that something—a bicycle, a soda bottle, a baseball—did not pose a threat. My life goal became an obvious one: I had to survive. The problem was that these things not only incited his worry, they also set off his wrath. The house was booby trapped and he was the monster, lurking behind its doors, ready to catch us off guard. I can recall the way his rages came over him. A man of dark skin and dark eyes, it seemed as if a fire was lit from within. His words flew out of his mouth like flames.

His paranoia about the physical world projected itself onto the social order. At any moment one could fall from grace. Table manners ensured against such a fate. The list was a mile long. How pieces had to be chewed, soup sipped, cutlery put on the edges of plates once eating was done. I had to get into the habit of being a lady. Perfection was a kind of norm. But children are not very good at perfection. They are snotty, dirty little beasts, reluctant to fit the mold.

My father’s outbursts were confined to our four walls. Only waiters who didn’t make his vodka tonic just right or busboys who didn’t clear fast enough got a hint of his rages. He called us names. He told us we were stupid or selfish or spoiled brats. Once when I was visiting from college, I came home for dinner half an hour late. The meal was already eaten, the table cleared, and my father began to yell at me. He yelled until my brother stood between us and told him to stop.

But his anger rarely left home. Toward the end of his life, though, my father grew careless. Once he was in the car, driving a friend of my mother’s named Scarlet to a concert. Scarlet said something that my father didn’t like and he began calling her names. He called her a liar, the worst kind of person, every name in the book.

The next day my mother called me in tears. “A terrible thing happened,” she said.

“What’s that, Mom?” I asked.

“Your father lost his temper with Scarlet Leyton. I’m sure she’ll never speak to me again. He’s never done that before.”

I paused. “What do you mean, Mom? He’s never done it before? He did it every night.”

“But he never did it with people before,” she said.

“People,” I said. “Aren’t we people?”

“Oh, you know what I mean.”

In the end, looking back, I think that my father was an incredibly anxious person. In fact I think that in this day and age he’d be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and medicated. Shortly before he died, a friend of mine had a serious panic attack. His daughter, thinking he was having a heart attack, called me, and I rushed to his house. I had never seen anyone writhing or screaming in so much pain.

Afterward I went online and read a description of someone who suffers panic attacks. Fear of restaurants, fear of travel. Anxious in situations he cannot control. Nervous, claustrophic. Cannot be hemmed in. Uses temper to control his anxiety, often around seemingly meaningless things. And I found myself reading a description of my father.

I remember the circus. We went every year, but my father always had to leave before it was over. He didn’t want to get stuck in traffic, in the rush. He couldn’t stand being caught in the crowd. We’d be gathering up our things just as the huge cage was being assembled in the center ring. The cages that I knew contained the great cats were wheeled in, but I never saw the lion act because it was always at the end.

On Saturdays he would drive me for horseback riding and wait in the car. He’d take us to the movies, but never come inside. I sat through Peter Pan and Moby Dick, knowing my father was dozing in the parking lot. Even as I grew older and I was kissing boys in theaters, it was my father I envisioned, waiting in the car.

Once our new puppy chewed through the upholstery of a quilted chair. My mother noticed it late in the day and my father’s train was due home in an hour. My mother, with her degree in fashion design, got on her hands and knees. She wore a shirtwaist dress and an apron and her legs sprawled across the floor. I watched her move needle and thread as she requilted that chair.

Then she raced to the station to meet his train.

*   *   *

A cabdriver takes me to the Lonestar Steakhouse out on Highway 61. He asks what I’m doing in Davenport and I tell him I’m writing a book about the Mississippi River. “Wow,” he says, “that’s cool. You know when I was a boy my father told me once that he walked across the Mississippi. And I said ‘Dad, you aren’t Jesus.’ And he told me he walked across it at its source where it’s only a few feet wide.”

At the Lonestar I’m on high mullet hairdo alert. It seems they are everywhere. “Well, how’re you doing tonight?” my waitress, Tammy, says. “You all by your lonesome?” I’ve got the happiest waitress in the world and she tries to sell me something called the Texas Rose, which is a whole onion, fanned open and deep-fried. I pass on the Texas Rose and I order a glass of cabernet and a small New York strip steak. They do have sixteen-ounce steaks on the menu, which she tries to convince me will give me more for my buck, but I say no.

After that Tammy loses interest in me. I sit, sipping my cabernet, staring at the humongous footballs and beer cans that cover every inch of the ceiling. On the wall a stuffed Texas longhorn peers down at me. Tammy delivers a bucket of beer to a table with two mullets. A couple gets up and starts doing the Texas two-step in the middle of the floor.

I go back to my hotel. Thirsty, I get up in the middle of the night and find the water bottle I keep by the side of my bed. I take a big swig, but the taste is orange Fanta, which I assume was left by a previous guest.

The next morning in the hotel breakfast room I’m lining up my pills as an old waitress with a blue rinse and a tag that reads NANCY pours my coffee. I ask her how things are going and she says, “Could be better.”

When I ask her to fill me up again, I say, “How so?”

“It’s just not a good time around here,” Nancy says. I can see she’s old and tired and doesn’t want to be working on her feet.

“Things slow on the river?” I say.

Nancy nods, her face a rut of frowns. “We’re fifty inches of rain short. My son’s a farmer. He’s got four farms. Owns two and farms the other two. He lost his whole corn crop. Lost everything. Between 9/11 and Katrina and now this drought…” She shakes her head. “If you ask me, I think this country’s just about through.”

Nancy brings me my eggs, which I eat slowly. She doesn’t talk to me again.

22

I’M BACK at the boat before nine and the boys look happy to see me. We’re heading south again. But before we do, Jerry says I can pilot up- and downriver, get the feel of going upstream, and try out some wide turns. So far I’ve only piloted on a straight shot so this will be new for me.

It’s a warm day and I slip into a pair of pink capris and a pink spandex top, which I haven’t worn yet. They are also the only clean clothes I have left. When I emerge from my nook, Tom gives a whistle. “Oh-oh,” he says. “Lady in Pink.”

“Violation,” Jerry says.

It’s a big river here with just some pleasure craft as I maneuver under an old railroad swing bridge. I ease the wheel gently and execute my first turn around Stubbs’ Eddy, named for James R. Stubbs, who returned from the army in 1834 and lived for twelve years in a cave on Arsenal Island with an assortment of animals, including a pet pig. Since the outside curve of a river bend is known as an eddy, steamboat men, travelers, and locals came to call this bend in the river Stubbs’ Eddy.

As I’m making my turn, a cruiser, zipping along at about thirty miles per hour, slows to about two and gives me wide berth. “Hey, watch out for the Lady in Pink,” Tom howls.

“He just didn’t know what you were doing,” Jerry says. “He wanted to avoid any unplanned directional maneuver.”

“Well, I know what I’m doing,” I reply defiantly. Just then a sailboat cuts me off and I have to veer. I assume I’ve got the right of way, but Jerry shakes his head. “The boat with the least control always has the right of way,” he tells me.

“Well, in this case…,” Tom says, chuckling as the sailboat tacks away. “Hey, he’s not taking any chances.”

“Okay, guys, got it.” I continue making my turn.

“You don’t mind if I joke with you a bit?” Tom says, rather sheepishly.

“What the hell. It’s open season,” I reply. I’m heading for my second pass under the swing bridge when I notice that there are hundreds of people on the levee. In the water nearby boats are anchored. It is the anchored boats that give it away. “Hey, Jerry,” I say. “I think there’s a concert.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Well, see all those people and the boats? The boats are listening to music from the water. That’s why they’re tied up there.” I can see that they are dubious, but I know from summers spent in Prague, where I used to get into a pedalboat with a picnic to hear concerts for free.

Jerry takes the wheel as he always does when we maneuver in tight situations. As we get closer, they see I’m right. Sure enough, it’s a concert, but it’s electric blues. I have a feeling they won’t want to stop.

“It’s blues,” Tom says.

“Let’s rock,” Jerry says. He brings the River Queen into position near the levee. If it’s an old levee, he says we’ve got only six feet of draft, but he checks our depth and when he likes the way we’re lined up, says, “Okay, Tom, let’s drop anchor.”

Tom tosses an anchor in. “You want me to leave her slack?”

“Don’t drop the line!” Jerry shouts. “Let me move her back before she sets.”

Tom’s staring at the water. “That’s pretty nice for one anchor. You want another for a lovie-dovie?”

“Hey,” I ask Jerry, “have you ever thrown an anchor without a rope on it?”

Jerry looks at me as if I’m crazy. “No,” he says. We’ve got some B. B. King playing on the levee and the boys settle back with beers and diet Dew. I take a diet Coke for myself and start dancing on the flybridge. “Well,” Jerry says, “we scorched a mile and a half today.”

“Come On, Baby, Let the Good Times Roll” is playing and the crowd is rocking. A couple, dressed in all-white linen, is dancing on the levee. He’s wearing a white cap. I’ve come up on the flybridge with a bag of green beans in my hand to clean them in the shade. “What’s that?” Tom asks when he sees the bag.

“Green beans,” I say, holding it up.

He looks off as the music comes on loud and strong and pretty soon I’m dancing away and the couple sees me. They give a wave. The young man takes off his cap and salutes me. A cruiser comes up fast and a brown-haired woman in a bikini stands up and shakes her tits in time to the “boom boom” of the song at the crowd, which begins hooting and applauding. Tom’s applauding and Jerry’s just shaking his head. The hooter gives one last shake for good measure, then speeds away.

There’s a break in the music and I settle under the bimini and start breaking the tips off the beans. Tom stares at me for a few moments. “What’re you doing?” he asks.

“Um, I’m cleaning these beans for supper.”

“Well, you should do that in the galley, not on the fly.”

“Ah, well, I wanted to get some air and shade.” I point to the bimini, but I see that Tom is clearly annoyed.

“That’s not something you do on the flybridge.” And he gets up and heads below.

I’m stunned that I’ve upset him with my green beans. After all, he eats on the flybridge. Why can’t I prepare my beans? But it seems I’ve broken some code of the sea. Perhaps it’s bad luck having a woman on board. Or having green beans on board. Obviously I have offended some sailors’ sense of propriety or evoked some age-old superstition. I’m recalling Jonah. Perhaps now is when they cast me into the drink.

The music starts again and I put the green beans away. The couple in linen are dancing and waving me on and I can’t resist. I’m rocking alone, shaking to the blues, when suddenly I hear a splash. It sounds as if a rhino has leaped into the river. Gazing down I see Tom swimming and splashing while Samantha Jean starts to have a heart attack with me on the flybridge.

His mood of moments before is altered as he frolics and dives and knocks himself out. He disappears under the water, then comes shooting out again. He lies, splayed on his back, floating. Then after a while he wants to get back on the boat, but he’s having some trouble reboarding. I must admit to some small sense of satisfaction as Tom flails around by the swim platform but can’t quite heave his hefty self on board. As he swims to the bow and tries to board from there, I’m gloating. This must have something to do with karma.

He shouts up to Jerry. “Sir,” he says, “could you lower the bow step, please?”

But Jerry refuses. “Your failure to prepare is not my priority,” he says sternly, walking away. Jerry looks up at me. “That is an unauthorized swim.” I can’t tell if he’s kidding or not.

I give him a shrug, but I see that Tom is panting, struggling now to stay afloat. “Come on, Jer.”

Jerry shakes his head. But Tom is pleading and, finally, with a melodramatic wave of the hands, Jerry lowers the bow step for Tom. “Thank you, Captain,” Tom says as Jerry tosses a towel into his gut.

I switch to an afternoon beer, a rarity for me, as we groove to “Last night I got caught in a hurricane/when I asked her what her name was, she just said desire/Last night I got hit by a speeding truck…” I am lost in the lyrics, swaying on board, but the day is getting later and we need to find a place to beach for the night.

It’s time to pull up anchor. “Let’s move her forward a bit before bringing her up,” Jerry says to a dripping-wet Tom, his belly shaking. “I don’t want her to sink in deeper.”

Tom hauls the anchor out, and, as he does, a giant razor clam clings to it. “Wow,” he says. “Look at that.” He holds it up and it is a very big clam, maybe eight inches long. “I’ve never clammed with an anchor before.” He starts prying it off the line and gives me a look. “Now don’t clam up on me.”

To the tune of “Evil Woman” I groan as I struggle to help him with the line. Our little spat has ended. Tom jiggles the line until the clam drops back into the river. As we stow the anchors and start downriver, Jerry muses, “Maybe we should’a saved that clam and Mary could’ve put it in her journal.”

The river opens up and the urban landscape drifts behind us once again. We pass a silent grain elevator on the side of the road. I’m thinking it’s Sunday, but Jerry says it’s the drought. “She’d be working today if she had anything to do.” A barge going north soaks us with its wake. Some of its rafts have coal on them. One is filled with portable toilets.

I want to see where we’re headed and start flipping through the river planner I bought in La Crosse. But this planner ends a mile south of Davenport and we’re past that point. Now I’m making it up as I go along.

23

BUFFALO BEACH presents itself around a wide bend. The sun is setting and we’ve decided to tie up here for the night. But passengers on two cruisers are having a party at Clark’s Landing, where we’re heading. Just south is another, more deserted, beach on a woodsy spit of land and I’ve got my heart set on that one. “Can’t we go there?” I ask Jerry.

“Be quiet,” Jerry snaps. “Let me get us in.” He is nervous and focused and, I’ve learned, can get more than a little ornery in those moments. He points the nose of the River Queen straight for the beach, checking the draft of the boat, and cuts the throttle. At last I hear that sound of the boat coming up on the shore and, when Jerry is sure we are secure here, he explains, “There are rocks and wing dams over there. See them?”

I look, but see nothing. Just more ripples in the water that all look the same. “Well, you need to be able to see those things.” I nod, wondering if I ever will. “We’ll spend the night here.”

Tom’s already out of the boat with Samantha Jean, who is “chasing waves.” “Go get the waves!” Tom yells. “Come on, Sammy, go chase some waves!” He’s taking down the anchors, placing and burying them in the sand. Then he wanders off in search of driftwood for a fire. I’ve got steaks in lime, corn in salt and lime wrapped in foil, and I start cooking green beans the way my mother cooks them, in butter and soy. Jerry uncorks the merlot.

Jerry gets those steaks off the grill just in time and we eat on my table on the bow in silence, the corn, the steak, those green beans, sipping our merlot. We all agree it’s one of the best meals we’ve ever had. A harvest moon’s rising to the northeast—full and orange, the kind that will light fields all night as farmers bring in their corn and we stomp out the fire and head to bed.

I’m settling down to read when Jerry “knocks” on my curtain. “I’ve been wanting to show you this.” He’s never invaded my space before and I am a little surprised. But as I pull back my green curtain, he hands me a copy of People magazine. He tells me that inside I’ll read about his son, Chris, the boy who once swallowed the Liquid-Plumr, and his wife, Kristin. “Is this the rest of the story?” I ask, and Jerry nods. Then he says good night.

Eight years ago, when Chris was thirty-three, his liver failed him. This was in part because of the Liquid-Plumr and years of surgery and medication and finally substance abuse. He was lying in a coma and wasn’t expected to live unless an organ donor was found. Jerry and Kathy were trying to come to terms with the situation when they learned that the day before a fourteen-year-old girl from St. Louis named Meghan was on a holiday skiing outing with her school and she crashed into a tree. She was taken to a nearby hospital in Wisconsin, where she was declared brain-dead.

Meghan’s parents agreed to take her off life support and have all her organs donated. Chris received the liver. A woman in the next room received the heart and lungs. Another man received her corneas. And so on. A year later Meghan’s parents met with all the people willing to meet with them, who had received the organs of their only daughter. At this meeting Chris met Kristin, the woman who had received the heart and lungs. They fell in love, married, and Meghan’s parents attended their wedding.

I lie there, listening to the ducks squawking as they settle for the night. How could I worry about my father’s clothes? I tell myself. These people donated their daughter in all her parts. I think of Kate, her chocolate brown eyes, her beautiful hair. My daughter is not someone I think of in pieces.

Kate was born during a blizzard in New York. She was a month early, a phenomenon that apparently occurs during snowstorms and full moons. The night before I had taken a baby safety class. What do you do if your baby is on fire? What do you do if your baby is plugged into an electrical outlet? I had gone to the class alone and walked home along Central Park.

Snow was already beginning to fall and I lay down on my back to make a snow angel. I felt tired and my back ached. That night I couldn’t sleep. For the past several nights I hadn’t been able to sleep. I ran into an elderly neighbor in the lobby of my building and she’d asked how I was doing. “Oh, I’m fine,” I told her, “I just can’t sleep.”

“The baby’s coming,” she said.

I shook my head. “Not for another month.”

She shook her head back to me. “Now,” she said.

When I got home, I made myself some soup. I sat up, watching the news, trying to get tired, but sleep wouldn’t come. I got into the tub and took a long hot bath and when I got out of the tub, my water broke.

My friend who lived upstairs took me to the hospital. Standing on snowdrifts, we hailed a taxi. It was four in the morning. I was nine months pregnant, carrying a small suitcase. When we got into the cab, the driver said, “I’m not going to the airport.”

“I’m not either,” I gasped.

When we got to the hospital, I handed him a twenty. “I don’t have any change.”

“Keep it,” I said.

As I entered the hospital’s double doors, a man passing a kidney stone tried to beat me to the reception desk. He was holding his side howling in pain as he pushed me out of the way. “We take the pregnant woman first,” the intake officer said and the man slumped to a bench. I labored for almost twenty hours. When the doctor told me he was doing a C-section, I told him I didn’t care if he did a lobotomy. I wept uncontrollably the first time I heard Kate cry.

Six weeks later we flew down to Florida to spend a week with my parents. Before we arrived, I called my father to ask if he was comfortable with our visit. “Why not?” he replied. “We’ve got plenty of room.” Of course he knew what I meant. My father met Kate for the first time. As I sat in a lounge chair by their pool, trying to sleep, I watched him, walking with her in his arms around and around the pool.

Lying in my berth on the Mississippi River, I’m tired. I am genuinely tired and I don’t feel the fast beating in my chest that has been my companion these past months. I flick off the light and pull the covers up to my chin. Only the sound of a passing freight train punctuates the night.

*   *   *

I wake in the morning as rested as I’ve been in months. I dress quickly and tell Tom and Jerry that I’m going to Casey’s Convenience Store to see if they have real, brewed coffee and any olive oil, which I consider to be a staple.

“Olive oil?” Tom hoots. “And I’m Popeye.” He flexes a muscle for me. “Hey, Jer, you must be Bluto.”

“Oh, olive oil. Right.” Jerry nods in agreement. “How about motor oil? Can you cook with motor oil? That’s more like it.”

“Yeah,” Tom comes back. “Motor oil. Hey, you don’t even need to go to the store. I’ve got some Valvoline 50 around here.”

“Hey, pick up a little chardonnay while you’re at it!” Jerry shouts. “French would be nice.”

“Okay, boys. I’ll catch you later.”

Tom raises his big fists into the air. “The Comedy Hour begins,” he shouts as I head into town. On my way I stroll by houses with Halloween decorations up in full force—ghosts, witches, jack-o’-lanterns. It’s only September 18. I can’t imagine what they do around here for Christmas. GO VIKINGS banners are glued to windows. A lawn is planted with wild prairie grass and milkweed.

On a front stoop a red and white tub sits with a sign that reads TUB REFINISHING. A glassed-in porch displays dozens of shoes in all sizes and shapes. Birkenstocks, sneakers, pink platform shoes, flip-flops, high heels, kids’ shoes, nurses’ shoes, old people’s shoes, hiking boots, galoshes.

This is riverfront, Main Street, U.S.A. Picket fences, flagpoles, lawn gnomes, screened-in porches, swings. The kind of houses Tom will later comment remind him of those in the old cowboy movies. Where you shoot a guy and he falls off the roof into a bale of hay. I go into Casey’s and Tom’s right. I am much more likely to find motor oil than olive oil.

Then I head back to Clark’s Landing, the only restaurant in town, where I’ve agreed to meet the boys for breakfast. I get there first and take a booth near the front. It’s Sunday morning and farm families are having breakfast after church. One family has five towheaded children, stabbing at their buttermilk pancakes swimming in syrup. There are men in company caps and Stetsons and a few wearing leather jackets that say on them STURGIS, SOUTH DAKOTA, where the annual Harley festival is held.

I’ve missed the Friday-night special. Beer-battered or biscuit-battered catfish, served with a nonalcoholic wine cooler. Deep-fried broccoli on the side. My stomach is churning as the boys come in. Tom takes one side of the booth and Jerry sits next to me. “We’re both left-handed,” he says. “That’s a good thing.”

Tom orders diet Dew, which comes in a huge white plastic glass, and he manages to down three of these glasses of greenish yellow liquid before his breakfast of two double cheeseburgers and fries is done. I’m having a pair of eggs over easy. Jerry orders the Western omelette, which is smothered in American cheese, cooked with peppers and onions. “I feel like eating light today,” he says.

After breakfast we stumble back to the boat. It is a beautiful day and Jerry doesn’t seem to be in a rush. Tom starts chasing Samantha Jean up and down the beach and Jerry’s tossing water onto the deck. I want to take my first river swim. The water looks clean enough and calm. I tell Jerry and he gives the river an eye. “Good day for it,” he says. “Might join you myself.” He pauses. “Wear your river shoes.”

“I was planning to.” I have already been warned of the dangers of clam shells that can slice off your heel.

“And maybe you should wear a life jacket,” Jerry adds as a second thought. A life jacket? Oh, he sounds like my dad. River shoes, life jacket. Tie a line around my waist? I am a very strong swimmer and the river is completely still. And I’m not planning to swim across it. Just paddle out a little ways. I cannot imagine why I’d need a life jacket.

I put on my bathing suit and river shoes and start to slip into the water on the upstream side of the boat when Jerry eyes me. “Don’t get in on that side. You always want to swim on the shore side of the boat in the direction of the current. Always get in the water downstream from the boat.”

I give him a questioning stare.

“People go out swimming in the river and the current carries them under their boats. They get stuck there and drown. Oh gosh, there were these two kids on a raft once…”

I put my hands over my ears and pretend to sing a song. “It’s okay,” I say. “Don’t tell me.” Good old Jerry. Always a cheerful cautionary tale to go with any misstep you’re about to make on the river. So I drag myself out of the water and go to the downstream side of our boat and put my feet into the silt. The bottom sucks at my river shoes.

The river is calm. Its surface is glossy and there is hardly a ripple as I lift my feet out of the silt, which seems to want to suck me back down. I swim out a few dozen yards and feel the first tug of water. Turning, I see that Jerry has gotten into the river as well and is tossing a life ring to Samantha Jean, who proceeds to rip it to pieces. Jerry is trying to get her to stop and I’m watching them play when I realize they are getting smaller and smaller.

It occurs to me that I’m being carried downstream. It is in fact a rather pleasant sensation. A little like being on a water-slide. But as I watch the River Queen slip away, and Tom and Jerry diminish in size, and Samantha Jean becomes a speck on the horizon, I grow concerned. I am being taken for a ride.

I try to swim back. At first I do a leisurely breaststroke, but I’m not getting anywhere. I try again, but I still seem to be moving away from the shore. This feels a bit like swimming in one of those continuous pools where you have to use all your strength just to stay in place. And I’m going backward.

I try harder, then switch to a crawl. I use all my might, but I make little progress. If anything it seems that I am being carried backward as if in a riptide. In another moment I’ll be halfway to Memphis. I suddenly see why Huck and Jim missed their turnoff up the Ohio. Anyone would. They were riding this conveyor belt too. The river is a team of horses, dragging me with it.

I also see the wisdom of wearing a life jacket and I definitely understand the problem of getting sucked under the boat. But this is all hindsight. I’m fighting like a demon to get back to shore. Tom and Jerry are playing with Samantha Jean and the life ring and I give them a wave. “Hey, guys!” I call. They wave back. I swim, struggling, toward them. “Hello, Jerry? Tom?” I call to my two half-deaf river pilots, hoping they’ll get the hint and throw me a line as they frolic at the shore. But they just wave.

Now I put my face in the water and use all the power in my arms. I paddle as if I’m being chased by a giant catfish, the kind rumored to lurk in the muddy depths of this stream. Brave souls “noodle” for them with their bare arms. I swim for my life and finally I reach a place around the bend where, for the first time, I can actually see a wing dam. There it is, a ripple in the water. A thin line of rocks barely revealed. A wing dam. It has eluded me, but I will recognize one from now on. And I know that on the other side the current will be weaker.

I work my way around it, treading water, and soon my river shoes graze the silty bottom. Breathless, I drag myself onto the sand where they notice me. “Hey, Mary,” Tom says. “How was your swim?”

“Great.” I’m gasping for breath. “That river is strong,” I tell them and they concur.

“You didn’t need that vest, though, huh?” Jerry asks.

I nod. “Actually, I could’ve used it,” I say.

Jerry nods thoughtfully. “Well, next time you should.” Just offshore Samantha Jean frolics on top of the life ring as Tom splashes water into her yelping face.