by Lee Smith
“Good heavens,” Harriet says, though she has heard similar stories from the women in her classes. “What did you do?”
“Well, it was all out of my hands by then anyway. But I was hard, too hard, on him. They jerked him out of school and shipped him off to rehab, and when that didn’t work, I sent him off to another rehab, but he turned eighteen while he was there and said he wanted to come back home, and I wouldn’t let him. I said he had to stay. To make a long story short, he left anyway, and bummed around for a while, and got back on the stuff, and shot somebody, and ended up in federal prison in Atlanta. Wouldn’t see me while he was there. Said if I didn’t want to see him, he didn’t want to see me. Now this would have broken his mother’s heart, thank God she didn’t have to know it.”
“Where is he now?”
“I don’t know, that’s the hell of it, though he sends me a postcard from time to time.” Pete takes a billfold out of his back pocket and opens it and unfolds a postcard with a Montana postmark on it. The postcard is folded in fourths. “Hey Dad,” it reads, “Hope you are okay, I’m hanging in. Big sky out here. Yours, Cliff.” Pete looks at it for a minute. “Lois saw to it that he had good penmanship,” he says. Carefully he folds the card back up and puts it back in his wallet. Pete looks at the river while a younger waitress—not Frances, maybe Frances has given up on him—clears their plates. “Dessert?” she asks. “Oh, I couldn’t,” Harriet says, and Pete says, “None for me.” He looks really far away now.
“You still didn’t tell me how you got to be a Riverlorian.”
He turns back to her. “Things had kind of generally gone to hell, as I told you, what with Lois dying and my boy gone, and I just didn’t give a damn, frankly, about football. It all came to seem real silly to me. And I was being casseroled to death by the merry widows of Cairo. I was drinking like a fish, too. So you can imagine what kind of coaching job I was doing. Finally my old friend John, the principal, came over to see me and offered me a paid leave of absence from my coaching duties and my history teaching, just for a year, so I could get myself together. But I never went back. I couldn’t. Oh, I fell down into a dark place indeed, let me tell you. Finally, in desperation I started to read. It had been years since I’d had time to read, but now I found that it calmed me. It interested me, and nothing else had interested me in a long time. I read biographies, I read history. I read everything I could get my hands on about the Mississippi River, and that’s when I ran into Mark Twain. Now Mark Twain really interested me. For he was dark, dark as me by the end of his life, you know, his entire family having died on him, and I reckon I identified with that. With him.
“Then one day I was in a bar down there in Cairo by the docks when some people off a steamboat came in, and one of them asked me, she said, ‘Say, aren’t you the guy who does the Mark Twain show on our boat?’ And I had to tell her no, of course, that I wasn’t, but it got me thinking. So I let my moustache and my hair grow out a little more, and the next time they came through, I went down to the levee and walked right onto the boat. I figured I had nothing to lose, one way or the other. And son of a gun, it turned out that the company was actually looking for more Mark Twains right at that time. In fact, they were kind of desperate because one of their Mark Twains was going to have this big back operation, leaving them shorthanded for the next few months. ‘Fellers,’ I said, ‘Sign me up.’ ‘Do you know anything about Mark Twain?’ they asked me, and I said, ‘Well, by coincidence, I do.’ ‘Can you do a Mark Twain show?’ they asked me, ‘if we can get you a script?’ and I said yes. I had nothing to lose, as I said. I had already lost it all. So the next time they came through, I was waiting down at the dock in a three-piece white suit with my satchel, and I just walked on board, and that was it. Been with the company eight years now. It’s a fine job. I make, oh, six to eight runs a year. I enjoy it. Rest of the time I read, garden, teach a dance class over at the senior center, do my show around the state, at schools and rest homes and such, I can vary it for any age group. Eat the casseroles, kiss the widows. I’m still waiting for my boy to come back, and I’m still waiting for the right woman to come along.” He winks at her. “In the meantime, I have to admit, I’m enjoying myself. I’ve enjoyed myself here at lunch today.” He hands his credit card over to the waitress.
“So you think this date went okay?” Harriet is horrified to hear herself ask.
He starts laughing as the waitress brings him the bill; he signs his name with a flourish, then looks up at Harriet from underneath his heavy white eyebrows. “It went just fine,” he says. “And I hope I may buy you a drink tonight, after Mark Twain’s lecture, perhaps?” He stands. She stands too, knees wobbly.
“Well?” he puts his hand on the small of her back to guide her out. People at several tables wave, nod, or smile at them—they’re all from the Belle, they recognize the Riverlorian. Giddily, Harriet waves back. “Well, sure,” she tells him.
Pete opens the door and suddenly they’re back in the real world, it’s unbelievably bright out here, like coming out of a movie, Harriet thinks, a movie about somebody else’s life.
Mile 364.2
Natchez, Mississippi
Tuesday 5/11/99
1810 hours
SEATED AT THE LITTLE DESK in her stateroom, wearing the pink peignoir, Anna’s already on Chapter 4. In 5, she will “break the back” of this novel. That’s how she thinks about it anyway, though she has never revealed her secret tricks of the trade to anyone. After 5, the chapters will become progressively shorter in length so as to enhance the aura of suspense, of the characters rushing ever more rapidly toward their destiny. For the reader, the novel will thus pick up speed until she is literally unable to put it down. Or so one hopes. Anna sneaks a look at the clock, then plunges her pen deep into the inkwell again for what must be her last lines of this writing day:
For no reason at all, Jade Cameron stirred in sleep and then opened her eyes. Only 2 A.M., yet she felt strangely, violently awake. Pulling the creamy satin robe around her nude body, she stood and crossed to the long window giving out upon the brooding mysterious swamp now ethereally lovely in the light from the full moon hanging low upon the horizon. Jade opened the heavy latch. Cicadas whirred. Night birds called. The live oaks groaned while their curtains of Spanish moss waved gently in a sudden breeze. Without pausing to reflect, Jade stepped out into the moonlight. She was walking forward, her bare feet sinking deliciously into the soft carpet of damp moss, when suddenly—
“Oh, I’m sorry, Miss Trethaway! I’ll come back later!” It’s Huckleberry, carrying the evening tray of Perrier, mints, and a clean glass for her bedside table.
“That’s perfectly all right, dear. Just go right ahead and put it down, as long as you’re here.”
He does so, pausing to turn down her coverlet and plump up her pillows while Anna watches him. His shirt is white and crisp, his hands are tan, his tie is crooked. Freckles fan across his cheek. He really is extravagantly handsome in the most wholesome sort of way. He places a Godiva chocolate on her pillow.
“Will there be anything else, Miss Trethaway?”
“Well …” Anna puts down her pen and purses her plummy lips and looks at him. He looks back. But the dinner bell sounds; footsteps and voices fill the corridor outside the flimsy stateroom door. The moment has passed. “Ta-ta!” Anna wiggles her fingers at him. “Until tomorrow, then—”
Mile 229.4
Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Wednesday 5/12/99
1035 hours
ARRIVING AT THE CALLIOPE BAR a little late for their ten-thirty meeting, Courtney’s surprised to find Harriet already sipping a huge New Orleans hurricane, served in a ridiculous fat-bellied brandy snifter. “Isn’t it a little bit early for that?” Courtney climbs onto the bar stool next to her.
“Hello there, young lady!” The old man on Courtney’s left has the face of a drunk, but he’s wearing a beautiful seersucker suit. Courtney ignores him.
“Harriet? Hello?”
Courtney nudges her. “I said, isn’t it a bit early for that?”
“Oh, Courtney,” Harriet sighs in an otherworldly sort of way. “Pete wants me to stay over in New Orleans, instead of flying straight home. He says he wants to show me the French Quarter and take me dancing.”
“Well, do it!” Courtney was planning to order coffee, but now she decides to have a vodka and orange juice instead. “Why not? You’ve got no husband, no family, to hold you back and keep you from having a good time.” This comes out more bitterly than she expected, but Harriet doesn’t seem to notice. “I’d certainly do it if I were you.”
“Oh, I just don’t know.” Harriet swishes the umbrella around and around in her Hurricane, creating a scary little whirlpool. “I mean, I don’t think I can. I mean, I can’t. I’ve already got my plane ticket.”
“Change it.” Courtney takes a big gulp. “It’ll only cost you seventy-five to change it. Well worth the money.”
“Oh, Courtney—”
“Good morning, girls! Have you met my good friend, Mr. Stone?” Here’s Russell in a crisp white shirt and a Red Sox baseball cap with binoculars and a camera slung around his neck. The old man sways on his stool, nodding at them all. He looks like he’s about to fall off.
“Oh yes, we certainly have met Mr. Stone, haven’t we, Harriet?” Courtney nudges Harriet who stares off into space in the mooniest possible way. Honestly! She doesn’t have the sense God gave a house cat.
Russell orders a Bloody Mary in a plastic cup. “I’ve got to go,” he says. “Time for the USS Kidd tour. Catherine will be along in a minute. She wants to go to the swamp with you.”
“What is the USS Kidd again?” Harriet asks.
“It’s a restored naval destroyer. The reason I want to see it is that it’s the ship my uncle served on in the Pacific.”
“Now I was a ball turret gunner,” Mr. Stone says loudly, suddenly. He sits straight up with a light in his eye.
“No kidding, old buddy?” Russell turns to him with interest but he has slumped back down over the bar already, face turned away. Russell shakes his head.
“I couldn’t possibly do it,” Harriet says hopelessly to herself.
“Enjoy yourselves, girls.” Russell is off. “Don’t let a gator get you.”
“We’d better go, too. Here, this’ll cover both of us.” Courtney pays up and practically drags Harriet away, the little dunce.
“Oh, look,” Harriet says suddenly as they pass the Grand Saloon, where a billboard announces the Marriage Game in progress. “That’s Leonard and Bridget, right up on the stage there. They must be contestants. Let’s go in for just a minute, Courtney. Don’t we have time?”
Courtney consults her watch. “I guess so. But just for a minute, okay?”
They take a seat in back with a good view of the stage where Leonard and Bridget sit comfortably on a love seat, along with two other couples on two other love seats. Melinda Post, one of the Steamboat Syncopators, is dressed as a judge. “Okey-dokey!” She bangs an oversized gavel on the same desk used by Mark Twain last night. “Okey-dokey!” she says with fierce gaiety into her microphone. “Okey-dokey! For the first question, what is the color of your shower curtain at home? Oh, look at the guys, they’re all thinking—but you can tell they don’t know. They don’t have a clue! All right—Bart! Where you from, Bart?”
“Pasadena, California.”
“And what is the color of your shower curtain at home, Bart?”
“It’s—ah—blue.”
“Okay, let’s go to Liz, his lovely wife of how many years?”
“It’ll be forty on Thursday.”
Applause for Liz and Bart.
“Okay, Liz, what color is that shower curtain?”
“We don’t even have a shower curtain, you idiot! We have a shower stall! You dummy!” Liz hits Bart over the head with her big straw purse while the crowd goes wild.
Judge Melinda bangs her gavel. “And now for our next pair of lovebirds, Eleanor and Bud Patkin. Where are you from, folks?”
Eleanor and Bud from Rochester, New York, get it wrong, too; but Leonard and Bridget get it right, winning one hundred points. Their shower curtain is silver. Silver? “How does Bridget know how to do this so well?” Harriet whispers to Courtney. “How do they all know how to act?”
“From TV,” Courtney whispers back. “This is based on that old show The Newlywed Game, didn’t you ever see that? It’s been around for years.”
“I guess I don’t watch much TV, really. I’ve got one, though,” Harriet adds hopefully.
Judge Melinda asks the husbands to “name something of yours that she would really like to throw away. Oh, look at their faces, folks, they’re thinking. ‘Now what could I possibly own …’”
Bud picks his lawn-bowling hat, Bart picks his handgun, somewhat ominously, Harriet feels, while Leonard picks his old robe.
“No, honey, it’s your computer,” Bridget says. “I hate the way you spend so much time with it now instead of me.”
“Awwww,” goes the crowd.
“Come on.” Courtney pulls Harriet to her feet. From the door they hear Judge Melinda’s next question. “Okay, boys, which of your wife’s girlfriends is the best looking?”
“Living or dead?” Old Leonard leans forward to ask. It seems to be an honest question, but the crowd cracks up.
“Oh Jesus.” Courtney pushes Harriet out the door. Old Leonard gives her the creeps. Gene has just got to change his mind. Courtney can’t believe he’s being so silly.
“ANNA! WHAT A NICE SURPRISE!” Harriet says as Anna flaps across the concrete landing in sandals and long skirt and peasant overblouse, necklaces and red hair flying out behind her like a flag. It’s only the second time Anna has been seen outside during daylight hours since the trip began. They all board and take seats facing each other in the very back of the tour bus.
“Thank God for air-conditioning.” Anna spreads her skirts out around herself, then fans her red face with a notebook. “I felt I should come and take notes, since I’m actually setting my new book in the swamp, after all,” she explains. “I’ve never been in a swamp, but of course I’ve never let that kind of thing stop me before!” She throws back her head to join in their laughter.
“Can you give us a little preview of the plot?” Catherine asks.
“Oh, sure—”
In no time the bus is pulling into a large leafy glade beneath enormous live oaks that shade several ancient-looking buildings. Why, it looks like some kind of a shantytown! Although it is, well, adorable, as Anna announces upon alighting. The bus is welcomed by a young accordion player and a fiddler, sawing away at that New Orleans–style music, and they’re adorable, too. But it’s all so foreign back in here, it makes Harriet even more nervous. It’s a different world, it might as well be Europe, it might as well be France. That old playground rhyme comes into her mind: I see Europe, I see France, I see Harriet’s underpants! Good Lord. The live oaks droop over an open-air restaurant with weathered picnic tables under a tin roof. Loose chickens run everywhere, pecking at the ground around their feet. A big orange tabby cat lies sleeping on a giant stump. Old men play checkers at a battered table. And right beyond the bait shop, beyond the canoe rental shack, lies the swamp itself, another world. The musicians turn out to be their tour guides, too, the owners of Alligator Bayou. Bill, the little one with the curly dark hair, runs the canopied launch Alligator Queen while Sandy, the larger, blond one, tells them about the swamp, pointing out cypress hardwoods and resurrection ferns, which disappear in dry spells but come back out when it rains.
“Today,” Sandy says, “Alligator Swamp Refuge protects 901 acres of land that is home to alligators, snakes, turtles, owls, white-tailed deer, black bear”—“BEAR!” Anna writes in her notebook—“and more than 250 species of birds.” The Alligator Queen cruises out of the still bayou and glides onto a silver lake. “Here you’ll see egrets, herons, ibis, cormorants, and anything else that happens to be migrating along
the Mississippi River flyway, depending on the season,” Sandy tells them. “And if you’ll look closely, you’ll see a lot of ratlike animals, about as big as cats, up there on those cypress knees. Look—right there! Yes, ma’am. Those are nutria. They are not native to this habitat, and they have become the scourge—”
“Oh, gross. Aren’t they awful?” Anna exclaims, writing fast.
“I used to have a nutria coat,” Catherine says. “All the girls in Birmingham had nutria coats, it was quite the thing.”
Anna thinks of having her heroine tied to a stump, nibbled by nutria.
“Now right ahead of us, just to the left, see that log? This is actually a huge male gator, we call him Fred, he likes to hang out over here.” The Alligator Queen rocks as everybody moves up to look at Fred. “Oh, he’s huge!” “How can you tell it’s a male?” Giggles. Anna alone still sits in her seat, writing.
“Don’t you want to go up and look at him, ma’am?” Bill asks from the wheel at the back of the launch. “We’re right on him. You’ll get a good view.”
Anna finally looks up, focuses, smiles. “Oh heavens no,” she says. “There are many things which I really prefer to imagine, and this is one of them.” It’s so humid out here she’s about to faint, and who really cares about all these slimy animals and birds and things, except insofar as they provide atmosphere anyway? Especially who cares about their sex lives, which Sandy seems determined to go on and on about.
“Alligators mate very gently, in fact that’s the only time you can ever see the difference between the male and the female, the only time you can tell their sex organs, which only come out for breeding.”
“I think that’s lovely,” Catherine says, as they all return to their seats.
Anna can’t possibly use any of this distracting information, though she does like the way Sandy and Bill wear these big lace-up hiking boots with their khaki shorts, sort of a Crocodile Dundee look, very attractive. Now they have left the lake and headed up another dark bayou which really is primordial, though Anna is aware that she has used that word too much in the novel already—well, it’s almost intestinal, isn’t it, or reproductive, like the dark bayous of the body—