Narrow Dog to Indian River

by Terry Darlington

  We kissed and Jim jumped around us and made oogling noises and brought us his frog of plush.

  An hour later I was on the floor clutching my stomach and leaning over the side trying to throw up. It's the stress of thinking I was going to die, I said, and running my heart at two hundred and fifty miles an hour. I'll be better tomorrow.

  I've had about a bloody nuff, said Monica.

  THE VILLAGE

  OF THE DAMNED

  Virginia

  Reversed Roadside Skipper — The Boo Ease — The Village of the Damned — The Rapture — Quick, Up There! — Night of the Living Dead — The Bionic Woman — Bread of Heaven — This Guy Doesn't Understand English! — The Giant Frog — The Red Bugs — They Will Burst Out of Me and Run Around the Butter Dish — The Flood — For You, Tommy, the War Is Over — The Turtle Not the Mock — The Blue Crabs — From the Zenith Like a Falling Star — The Sub-machine Gun — Letter to the Captains

  THE GREAT DISMAL SWAMP VISITOR CENTRE was twenty minutes south, three miles over the South Carolina border.

  The centre was cool and spacious with three ladies. Sure you can moor up here on your way through in October, if we are still here, said one of the ladies. Last year they didn't renew the budget until someone found some money in another account. This year we don't know yet.

  She looked at me as if I were responsible for the US Army Corps of Engineers' refusing to maintain the Great Dismal Swamp Canal, or I should be offering to finance it myself, or I could do something about it.

  When will you know about your budgets? I asked.

  Last year they told us in December. Guess you'd better give us a ring before you come, but don't set out before October. The hurricane four years ago took down seven hundred trees across the canal and you don't want one of those across your boat.

  I am sure the route along the Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal is very nice too, said Monica, and I know most people go that way, but we do want to go through the Dismal Swamp. It is so old, having been started by George Washington, and so mysterious and it's a real canal not a great river or an estuary and we are shallow enough to get along it easily. If we come can we stay at your quay?

  There is always room, said the lady. We hope you will come. The boats can breast up alongside each other. Some people won't but most do. Sometimes they put all the food in together and have a party.

  She seemed to have forgiven me for not sorting out her budgets.

  Outside, the canal was a hundred feet wide, with tall trees and undergrowth hard on each side. You could see a little way into the water, stained by the swamp into Typhoo, and you could enjoy the different leaves and branches, and the butterflies.

  They danced on the grass, their wings wide, almost jagged, colours gentle, with flashes of blue and red and yellow. At times one would rise and float about. Each seemed to be different. There are fifty different butterflies on the Great Dismal Swamp Canal, the lady had said, and gave us a list. I looked at the part of the list titled Hesperiidae.

  The Poet Laureate could not have done better than that list, and the Poet Laureate before would not have stood a chance, and even John Betjeman would have been sweating.

  When reading aloud it is best to deliver the second verse quietly and ascend to a shout on the Roadside Skippers—

  Silver-spotted Skipper

  Southern Cloudy Wing

  Confused Cloudy Wing

  Juvenal's Dusky Wing

  Horace's Dusky Wing

  Southern Skipperling

  Clouded Skipper

  Delaware Skipper

  Duke's Skipper

  Hobomok Skipper

  Zabulon Skipper

  Yehl Skipper

  Dun Skipper

  Lace-winged Roadside Skipper

  Carolina Roadside Skipper

  Reversed Roadside Skipper

  What is a reversed butterfly? asked Monica.

  It's a concept some people find difficult, I said, but reversed butterflies are like reversed type—the letters that are holes in something else. A reversed butterfly is in fact not there at all. When a Carolina Roadside Skipper dies before its time (a cold night, a truck) it returns with the colours the other way round. You can never catch them in a net because they are just a hole in the scenery. It is the same with the blue butterflies you used to see in England—they are bits of sky that have sort of flaked off and you can't catch them either.

  Don't talk rubbish, said Monica, let's get on to Elizabeth City. The marina probably won't have us because it says in the book they only take short boats and they are at the start of Albemarle Sound and you are scared of talking to them because you are scared of Albemarle Sound and you have gone off into your world of your own.

  • • •

  ELIZABETH CITY WAS THIRTY MILES SOUTH. IT was low rise, spread out, and over all before it lay the Pasquotank River a mile wide; green shores and smoky blue water broadening for ever into Albemarle Sound, the terrible Albemarle Sound.

  The Pelican Marina had two plaster pelicans and a small chandlery, its door wide open. We got out of the car and there was a scream and a lady in her twenties ran out. We hurried Jim and the lady inside before they fainted from their kisses and embraces in the heat. If we had arrived with a vessel a hundred yards long with a verminous crew of pressed Scousers there would not have been a moment's doubt Pelican Marina would take our boat, providing Jim were on board.

  We brought up our website on the marina computer and Jeanie said Is that your boat, oh my Gard, oh my Gard. But see that mark here on the counter under the till—that's where the water came four years ago, and the one below it is the hurricane before that. Don't y'all come too soon, or your lovely boat could finish up in someone's bedroom.

  I suppose we could run back up the Dismal Swamp Canal, I said.

  Yes, said Monica, with seven hundred chances of getting a tree across the boat.

  Albemarle Sound is very calm now, said Jeanie—it has been like that for three days. It's usually like that in late July or August but it may not be like that when you come.

  We looked out at the Pasquotank River, glassy, fading into the sound.

  The captains rely on the Boo Ease, said Jeanie.

  Pardon? I asked.

  The Boo Ease.

  Oh yes, I said, and thought the Boo Ease must be the booze, or perhaps some sort of drug that sailors take so they don't worry so much, like they chew coca leaves in South America. My word this is a funny country.

  They can't do without the Boo Ease, said Jeanie—makes all the difference.

  Can you spell that? I asked—I have a bit of trouble with the language.

  Sure—B.U.O.Y.S.—the Boo Ease.

  WE CAN START STOCKING UP FOR THE JOURNEY, said Monica—time to visit a Wal-Mart.

  It was the hottest 2 August ever in eighty American cities. To feed the thundering air-conditioners of Virginia, Baltimore Gas and Electric broke the production records they had set the day before. In New York the Empire State Building was dark. Après nous le déluge. Monica and I stepped on to the boardwalk into a hundred degrees, and walked between the sheds and under the boats on stilts in the frying gravel.

  When a car has been standing all day in the sun in a hundred degrees you have thirty seconds to get in without touching anything and get the air-conditioning going before you die. It's like swimming underwater, or going back into a burning house to rescue the children.

  Up the road from the yacht basin along the canal, under the trees, and into Great Bridge and across the traffic of Battlefield Boulevard. Cedar Road off the boulevard is a wide carriageway with big houses, apartment blocks, churches, gas stations, restaurants, all on green plots—two, four, twenty acres. Want to buy a plot—put up a restaurant? Take a hundred acres—put up a shopping mall. Plenty of room in America, plenty of room along Cedar Road.

  After ten miles, a lake, a golf course. A new church, white with a green roof. Wooden houses spreading over the horizon, all similar, modern and smart, behind a gat
e.

  You owe it to yourself to experience the home styles and the country club lifestyle, perfect for active adults age 55 and better.

  You'll also enjoy peace of mind knowing a gate limits traffic into Eagle Pointe.

  Why stay in a house that's too much to handle? Why continue to climb those stairs? The time is now to discover the freedom you deserve at Eagle Pointe.

  At Eagle Pointe you won't have to bother to talk to the old poor guys who sit in the pub all day that you knew when they were young, or the lady in the newsagents who has been there since the war, or the dark lads in the Indian restaurant or the window-cleaner Monica tried to teach French to forty years ago and he hid in a cupboard in the classroom. Dave who owns the ironmongery won't remind you how close he ran you in the London Marathon. You won't have a chip shop or a tattoo parlour over the road, and you won't have to avoid the people who hate you because you had a bigger car than them in the seventies, or worry about the chip papers on the street or those noisy boys from the high school or those seventeen-year-old girls who are so graceful and make you feel all funny or the noise on New Year's Eve or the fireworks on your roof.

  At one o'clock it's Cookin' Chicks, the Women's Club Group, and Games of Choice. At six o'clock it's Creative Cuties.

  You won't have to worry about anything any more—come through the gates of Eagle Pointe, under a searing sky—come and join us in the Village of the Damned.

  WAL-MART WAS A SHED WHICH COULD HAVE contained the town of Stone, Staffordshire, and its pubs and boatyards and terraces, and its parks and meadows (the churches would have stuck out the top) but instead contained everything you would find in an English supermarket, apart from most of the interesting things.

  I worked out from the shelf space that the good people of Chesapeake drink one glass of wine each a year, which is Californian, and a small amount of American beer. American beer tastes like the piss of the Great Gnat of Newport News, and American lite beers are best not discussed in a book that might fall into the hands of children. Some drinks that they call lagers can be drunk without shame, though they do not put the strength of the beer on the pack, and sometimes after my second bottle of Samuel Adams I get feelings of cosmic understanding.

  It seems the only fish the Americans eat in quantity are frozen shrimps. Fourteen types of melon were displayed, few of which could be lifted by an adult male. There were four hundred yards of beef, and Wal-Mart was not scornful of the odd vegetable or those shiny yellow and red cherries. They had galleries and boulevards of canned foods and on the ends of the gondolas there was beef jerky, which is dried and flavoured with barbecue smoke and maple syrup.

  Yards of hymns and country music. I bought records by Willie Nelson, Kenny Rogers, Kris Kristofferson, Alison Krauss. A man could make a fool of himself over Alison Krauss, who is a bit cross-eyed but none the worse for that.

  It was late afternoon and there were not many shoppers. Most were overweight in an overweight sort of way but some were spherical or worse: their bums cantilevered with fat, their arms hung with fat, their faces swollen and their eyes dull. In England they would be overpowered and rushed to hospital.

  The books section was mainly romances, and motivational and religious writings. Most Americans believe that Christ will come to judge the quick and the dead fairly soon, and on that happy day, which they call the Rapture, the virtuous will ascend to heaven and the sinful will not. The Sun, a weekly newspaper in the genre of the UK Sunday Sport, reported that 100,000 people have already vanished from earth. A teenage boy had gone missing in Des Moines after beautiful trumpet-playing had been heard, and five fishermen were returning home from Alaska's Kenai Peninsula with a boatload of halibut when a crewman disappeared from his quarters. A picture showed a couple of dozen people in mid-air, looking upwards devoutly: the women in dresses, the men in shirts and trousers, their arms spread, ascending to their reward.

  On the shelf was the novel The Rapture, by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. Tim and Jerry have sold sixty million books.

  I read The Rapture right through. The Devil seemed quite an interesting bloke but the scenes in heaven were like being trapped in a performance of the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ at the Albert Hall until after the pubs have closed.

  WE WALKED JIM ON THE ISLAND IN THE BAKING dusk. It would not be a bad outcome, I said to Monica. I mean old age is not much fun with hernias and hearts already and incontinence and impotence and going mad as forthcoming attractions, and dying can be a painful and messy business. Why don't we join one of the American religions and get ourselves in on this Rapture lark, and then we could go for a walk one day and rise through the air hand in hand with Jim—we'll all be ready at about the same time—and continue our walk on the fields of heaven. Despite what Tim and Jerry say, I am quite sure there are canals, and public houses with London Pride at very reasonable prices, and pork scratchings from Wolverhampton.

  You are getting worse, said Monica, the heat has unhinged you. This Rapture business is ridiculous, a crazy cult. You can't just disappear into the sky like that. Terry, have you seen Jim?

  There he is, Mon. Quick, up there!

  THE MAN WHO GREETED US AT THE DOOR OF Chesapeake Library wasn't very tall, but his sword made him look bigger. He had a big belly and his hair was shoulder-length and he wore a bandanna and a black T-shirt printed with gothic scenes. His girl had a ragged dress and a bullet hole in her cheek.

  We can get sixty people, he said—we won an award. Sometimes we go until dawn. We are part of the library. Tonight it's the Night of the Living Dead—1968 version and then the 1990 version. Help yourself to the buffet—it's all free.

  We sat down. There were six people in the hall. Two women came in—the bum on one of them weighed more than me, and her friend was half a size smaller. They settled down and started eating. Then a lady came in who looked very straight, like a schoolteacher. She wrapped a blanket round her shoulders and sat down and went to sleep. Three people with long hair, dressed in black, came in and put up camping chairs and sat on them in sleeping bags. A small group of tattooed people came and lay down on the floor. The big women went back to the buffet because they had not been able to carry enough the last time.

  The main purpose of the Fantasmo Cult Cinema Explosion, like any film society, is to allow a dick, whose opinion would not normally be sought on any matter, the chance to tell you about the film you are about to see, and why you should enjoy it, and how clever he is, and what was the director's last film and all about the plot and who committed the murder. At Chesapeake Library the sworded one was joined by a thin young man, unarmed, in a black sweater—so it was Double Dick. For a quarter of an hour each dick tried to show he was the bigger dick. Finally they agreed that Can't Stop the Music with Valerie Perrine and the Village People was the worst film ever made.

  With a wave of the sword, half an hour late, Double Dick retired and we were away.

  The films were about the newly dead wandering about eating people. Both films were great. In the first version the girl is a useless dolly-bird, but by the second the culture had changed and she was an heroic military figure, and to tell you the truth a right cracker. You should have seen the bit at the end where she turned on the cowardly bloke who caused all the trouble. Then of course there was the bit with the big explosion and how the zombies came along and ate the people who had been blown up.

  It was late and as we left the fat women were finishing the buffet. Ghost films scare me, I said to Monica—won't watch them because if I do I am afraid to go to the lavatory in the night. But no trouble with the horror—it's just a good old laugh really.

  At the boat Monica took Jim out for a walk and as soon as they were gone the boat moved again. Someone had come on board, stepped off the quay and on to the front deck in the dark, perhaps more than one, not saying anything, just trying the door, ready to blunder down the boat and sink their teeth into me.

  But it was Jim and Monica hurrying out of the heat.

  Soon
we fell asleep to a gentle rain on the roof. An hour later there was an explosion overhead. The Phyllis May rang like a bell and the air was full of blue fire. I jumped up shouting—My God, they are here! The storm flashed and cracked and muttered all night and it rained and rained and next day it was only ninety degrees.

  • • •

  IT'S A DREADFUL BUSINESS IF A MAN CAN'T GO out with his dog for a pint, but you can't in Chesapeake, Virginia, because dogs are not allowed anywhere they serve food. And bars in America are dark, and there is always a drunk in the corner. In the Home Town Heroes bar on the shopping parade in Great Bridge he was a four-hundred-pounder and the barmaid brought him a large beer every ten minutes without looking at him.

  The barmaid was the spitten image of Lindsay Wagner, the Bionic Woman, in her panther prime. And good for her, she came through the encircling gloom with a glass of draught Samuel Adams that could almost have passed for a pint, and made Monica a vodka martini with three olives—you should have seen her shake it up. Then she brought us both a plate of beef ribs and salad and relishes which was the best meal we had in the US, or anywhere else really. It took only ten minutes to prepare, but no doubt Lindsay helped in the kitchen, making those pots fly.

  The Bionic Woman was about to run her first half-marathon. Monica gave her some tips on racing and Lindsay was grateful though no doubt she would have struggled through, being largely made of titanium and plugged into the mains all night.

  The drunk was a friendly chap. I suppose if you weigh four hundred pounds you can always work on the smile. There were twelve screens above the bar and he explained that the keyboard he was fiddling with was connected to the one asking trivial questions.

  Are there any prizes? I asked.

  One a year, he said.