* * *
And now Bert stood in the wheelhouse of the Phoenix III, pulling mud daubers’ nests off the control levers and gauges. A gummy spar varnish darkened the oak cabin, and the windows were cloudy with dust and soot. He looked around at the tarnished brass, the old-fashioned curved-front cabin, worrying about the ragged machinery. Bert always suspected that Dixon had hired him as a mean joke, and now he’d played another on him.
After he’d lost his teaching appointment, his wife had to find work as a secretary, and his children were taken out of private school. During the year of fruitless applications and interviews, his family buckled down as though waiting out a stubborn malady. There were no offers of jobs, only mild interest expressed by junior colleges in Alaska, Saudi Arabia, and a fundamentalist high school in West Virginia.
Once a week he’d ridden the Jackson Avenue ferry to collect his unemployment check. He liked the gritty smell of the Mississippi that met him at the landing, and the red-and-white tugs and broad, rusty freighters sometimes floated along the channels of his dreams. The throbbing vessels moved with the power and grace of great poems.
He got the idea to apply to a towing company for work. Dixon had laughed out loud when he saw Bert’s resumé. He disliked the idea of a man like Bertram Davenport so much that he hired him on the spot. He wanted to let the college man roast his brains on the steam tug Boaz with the backwoods savages from Arkansas he’d hired to run her. He was sure they’d throw him overboard first trip out.
However, Bert got along with the Arkansas men, who were not really savages but only easily angered farm boys from around Camden. He became an excellent harbor wheelman, learning the currents and signals as though they were in his blood. Dixon was grudgingly impressed. A smart wheelman avoided thousands of dollars in dry-dock work on smashed bows and bent propeller shafts.
Bert should have been satisfied with his success, but it only told him that he was a better river man than he had been a teacher. When he recalled how he had often bored his students and become disoriented while dealing with complex ideas in his lectures, he suspected that the English department was right in getting rid of him.
After two years, Bert was given his own small boat and was allowed to recruit men for his crew as replacements became necessary. The first scholar he’d hired was Max, his old graduate school roommate, an amiable but directionless man who worked on car engines for extra money and who had earned his final degree at forty-one after taking dozens of diverse and ill-chosen courses and then writing a seven-hundred-page dissertation on Byron and Nietzsche.
Dixon thought it a fine joke to have two scholars on one of his tugs, and he encouraged the hiring of more, so when Bert needed to employ a cook, he enlisted his old confidant, Dr. Laurence Grieg, who had been fired two years before for failing too many students, and whose hobby was preparing French cuisine. The two deckhands, Thomas Mann Hartford and Claude McDonald, were hired last.
* * *
From the wheelhouse, Bert heard an old generator engine rattle alive below, and the cabin’s lights came on slowly, like newly lit candles. A compressor began to chatter, and after a few minutes Max turned over one of the huge engines down in the hold, and it thundered alive, sending convulsions of black smoke from the tug’s stack. Bert pulled the wheel around and saw a swirling comma of water sail out from under the stern. At least the steering worked. On the boat’s long stern, he saw a deckhand making notations in a spiral-bound book. Every professor Bert knew wrote essays with the dream of earning some share of fame and a position at a well-known university. When he and his crew were languishing on the decks waiting for a towing call, most of them brought manuscripts to revise, add to, and argue over.
A month earlier, tied up in blinding fog below the Belle Chasse locks, they had met in the galley and had passed around one another’s works. For hours the men sat hip-to-hip, hunched over cramped handwriting or poor typing. The conversation was stiff and polite. The pedantic, graceless ordinariness of the writing showed in the faces of the scholars gathered under the pulsing lights of the small compartment. Bert read an article in progress by Claude McDonald, a man who was a true academic, very intelligent, but so educated that he was unable to compose two coherent paragraphs in a row. After a few pages he put the paper down and wondered whether his own work was half as taxing. He smiled faintly and nodded at Claude, who was sitting two stools to the left of him, struggling with Max’s enormous work on Byron. Bert turned to his right, putting his hand on Max’s shoulder. “Sometimes I think we think too much,” he told him.
Max frowned above a handwritten page. “Thought is life.”
Bert took back his hand. “Someone could just as well say, ‘Navigation is life.’ That’s what we are now—navigators.” He liked the sound of the word.
Max turned his dark eyes on him. “We’re navigators of thought.”
* * *
Bert set the wheelhouse clock and then climbed down to the galley, where Laurence Grieg had just made coffee in a half-gallon enamel pot. Bert held a hot ironware mug in both hands and studied Laurence, how his shoulders were rounding into middle age, worn that way like a boulder in a creek by his wife, who was constantly on his back about returning to an academic job. Laurence would never work again, for his dossier contained a damning letter from his department head.
“How’s Laura?” Bert asked, sitting at the counter that ran down one wall of the galley, a narrow compartment spanning the width of the boat. Laurence Grieg, who had lately begun dressing in khaki work clothes, all his polycottons and tweeds finally wearing out, adjusted the tiny gas range so the coffee would not boil.
“Laura is Laura.” He showed Bert a beleaguered smile. “She’s complaining about the smell of oil in my clothes,” he said, shaking his shiny head.
Maximilian lumbered in, got a cup of coffee, and left immediately. He seemed unaware that anyone else was in the galley. Thomas Mann poked his blond head in the door. “Bert, someone is on the radio for you.”
Bert put his cup down and went out into the wind, zipping up his corduroy jacket and climbing the flaking stairs to the wheelhouse. He picked up the receiver and spoke to the dock dispatcher, who told him that his boat might be sent to the mouth of the river to pull a ship from a sandbar. He signed off and saw that Max had followed him up. His face was weighted with embarrassment. “Bert, Loyola has rejected my application,” he said, looking away quickly, his face growing darker. He was not a man who liked to admit that he was in trouble. None of them were.
“What about the other applications?”
“The same. Tulane’s letter was very snide. The search committee said they did not employ industrial workers as professors.” He thrust his hands into his pockets. “It’s finally happened,” he said, looking down to the corrugated deck. “I didn’t tell you at first because I was ashamed.” He snuffled once, bringing a crisp new work-shirt sleeve up to his nose.
Bert imagined him in the classroom fumbling with notes. “Why are you ashamed?”
The engineer looked past him at a small gaily painted excursion boat grinding up the river, its decks speckled with tourists pointing their cameras at the old tug. Four of them waved with enthusiasm. “I’ll never be in the classroom again.”
Bert waved back absently. “Is that the worst that can happen?”
Max looked surprised. He replied only after he had thought fully half a minute. “The worst is what we think it is.” He smiled quickly, catching himself. He sat down in the wheelman’s chair. “I don’t think I can face it. The change, I mean. Giving up on teaching. Maybe, when my manuscript finds a publisher…”
“Max, you’re making a good living on this job.” Bert turned away, jamming his hands into his coat pockets, feeling his ring of keys, one of which fit an office door a thousand miles away.
Max pressed a palm on the glass of the wheelhouse window. His voice was low and steady. “Will any of us get back to where we belong?”
Bert broke another mud d
auber’s nest off an overhead gauge and threw it sidearm over the rail.
* * *
And then at eleven that Friday morning, there it was, Dixon’s voice on the radio like a tearing tarp. “Phoenix, come back.”
Bert grabbed the microphone quickly. “Phoenix by.”
“Doc, can you move out in a flash?”
“What? Are we going down to the jetties?”
“Lord, no. It’s a rodeo upriver. They’re lassoing runaway barges like crazy. Somebody’s chasing all but the lead barge. Go catch it.”
Bert squeezed the mike like a lemon and looked upriver. “Couldn’t you call out another boat? We’re—”
“Make it smoke, Doc. I don’t want to tell you twice.”
“I don’t know if we can catch it. I’ll have to think about—”
“Don’t think. Do.” Dixon was flashing into anger. The two deckhands, hearing the broadcast, crowded into the wheelhouse, little Thomas Mann shivering and Claude McDonald squeezing one joint of a finger in his book. Bert looked upriver and saw a long grain barge nose around the bend, riding high in the water, doing about seven miles an hour.
“Doc?” Dixon’s portentous voice tore through the old gray shortwave set. “You think you got tenure here or something?”
Bert looked at Claude’s arms, wondering how much was muscle. “Okay,” he sang, “we’re heading out. Phoenix Three over.” Without thinking, he began to give orders. Soon, Thomas Mann was hopping about on the landing barge like a blond monkey, untying the lines. Claude rattled down the steps to the pointed foredeck, where he began making up a bowline. Bert gave four short blasts of the whistle, and Max stuck his head out of the engine room door.
“Bertram. Where’re we going?” He gestured with a manuscript in his gloved hand.
“Just study your engines for a change,” he called. “We’ll need all the power they’ve got.”
Bert swung the steering wheel, leaned on the throttle levers hard, and felt the tug surge away from the landing barge. A cloud of black smoke billowed from the exhaust ports in the stack, the engines trembled like old horses, and Bert imagined he could hear Maximilian shouting encouragement to the machinery. He reached up for the whistle cord and blew another danger signal. The river was clear of traffic except for one ascending ore freighter, which he called to advise. The Phoenix III headed straight out toward the barge while Bert judged its speed and weight. Several options occurred to him instantly, not the result of deliberation. If he were to run the boat ahead and gradually slow down, letting the barge catch up to the stern and stop against it, the slanted bow might climb the rear deck and sink the tug. If he tried to tie on and control it from the side and couldn’t, it might drag the Phoenix downriver sideways and capsize it. He decided to catch it from the rear with a bowline and yelled for Claude to tie a hundred feet of two-and-a-half-inch nylon rope to the front towing bitts and to form the free end into a loop. He could hear Maximilian below, beating on something with a hammer or wrench, and suddenly the engines, their teeth-rattling vibration gone, surged smoothly with added power.
He piloted the tug to within thirty feet of the barge, cutting the engines to half speed and following the vessel downstream, letting its rusty sides slip past. Its mooring cleats were twelve feet above Claude’s head, and Bert hoped his deckhand could throw a rope that far.
As the stern of the barge slid past his bow, Bert revved the engines to keep up. Claude climbed on the hemp fender and swung the yellow hawser back and forth underhand as Thomas Mann waited behind him. He tossed the loop toward a cleat on the barge’s deck, but the line tangled in itself and fell short, splashing into the churning river. Bert cut back the engines to keep from nudging the barge into a spin, then blew another series of short warning blasts to alert any boats that might be ascending Carrollton Bend.
Thomas Mann retrieved the rope and coiled it on the deck so that it would pay out smoothly. He seemed not to be thinking about anything; perhaps there was not an abstraction in Thomas Mann’s head for the first time in years as he spread his legs wide, bent his back, and threw the rope into an orderly coil. When the boat rounded Carrollton Bend, Bert could see the willowy foot of Walnut Street on the east bank, and abreast of it, three-quarters of a mile below him, two excursion vessels, a tanker in midriver, and a towboat shoving a raft of barges past the tanker on the west, all ascending.
Claude climbed high on the bow, and Thomas Mann coached him on his swing. The big man’s black curls fluttered in the wind as he practiced swinging one, two, three times, and on the fourth swing, he flung his arms open like springs, tossing the noose spinning, spinning, up to the mooring cleat, where it hung on the metal like a cowboy’s lariat.
“Eeeeeh-haaaah,” Dr. Claude McDonald yelled as Thomas Mann pulled in the slack behind him, whipping it around the double towing bitts in four quick figure eights. Bert set the engine-control levers into full reverse, and the nylon line began to tighten like an archer’s bowstring. The barge slowed to a crawl as the propellers bit into the river. The hawser turned to rock, complaining on the bitts, creaking and popping on the painted iron.
“Get off!” Claude screamed at Thomas Mann, who was standing on the bitts, inspecting his knot. He jumped free and both men ran amidships as the line parted with a sound like cannon fire, whipping back to where the deckhand had stood, hitting the metal like a thunderbolt. The tug surged backward, and the barge was taken again by the current. Bert killed the engines and looked over the runaway hopper barge to the ascending tow. He saw the low profile and red vents of loaded petroleum barges. Sliding open a stubborn wheelhouse window, he yelled down, “Get Max out of the engine room, latch the doors on the first deck, and climb to the bunk deck with Laurence.”
Looking over at the ascending towboat, Bert could see its crew coming to the rails, donning life jackets. The big boat was trapped between the freighter and the bank, and both vessels had cut their engines. The Phoenix III and the barge drifted down on them. Horns and whistles filled the river, and the shortwave gave off a jam of panicked voices. Bert’s own crew of four watched at the rail below him as he made the old tug’s engines rumble. Soon they were sloshing alongside the barge, drawing close. When the tug’s bow was amidships and five feet off from the runaway’s side, Bert turned the wheel, jolting into the barge and holding the bow against its flank. The Phoenix III’s stern swept around and the tug began to capsize. It was taking the river sideways, leaning over into the current like an old drunkard falling down slowly. The barge began to respond and move sideways into the lower bank of Nine Mile Point, but water was roaring over the tug’s port rail. The crew scrambled to starboard and looked up to the wheelhouse for a signal to jump. Bert noticed that they had buckled their life vests correctly for once. They had no time to think about what they were doing.
The ascending tow was blowing shorts and the tanker contributed sonorous blasts of its steam horn. When the hopper was thirty feet from the bow of the leading petroleum barge, it swung clear into the dead water under Nine Mile Point, the Phoenix III heaving it toward the bank on a hard rudder. Bert looked behind, past the storm of his wheelwash, and saw the petroleum barge slide toward his stern, and he braced for the impact. The tug surged against the rusty, buckling steel, and the far side of the runaway began to rise in the air as it rode up onto a mud flat. Behind, the petroleum barge slid clear, brushing the hemp fender on the Phoenix’s stern. Then an empty lunch box slid off a shelf above the radio and banged to the floor and the port door swung out. A shout went up from the men at the rail as the boat went into a dying roll. Bert pulled back on the engine controls, but it was too late. The boat was heeling over, and with his crew Bert scrambled out onto the near-horizontal bunk deck wall.
Max swung down to the engine room door, pulled it open, and ducked under as it slammed like a gong. At once the crew slid toward the water and pulled at the latches on the oval steel door. They saw Max inside, struggling in a surf of brown water roiling in through the vents and up through
the bilge.
“Max,” the cook shouted, leaning in. “What are you doing?”
The engineer didn’t look up. “My manuscript,” he yelled.
The generator sucked up a charge of water and banged to a halt, the compartment falling dark. Bert jumped in, feet first, landing on the side of a stair ramp. “Forget it. Come on.” He grabbed Max by the shirt collar and hoisted his head above the oily water, but he shook out of his grasp.
“It’s the only copy,” he wailed, plunging in again, disappearing against the port wall. The river began to pour in the open door.
“It’s not worth it,” Claude MacDonald yelled at Max’s emerging head. “It’ll never be published.”
Thomas Mann Hartford hung upside down into the engine room. “Max,” he pleaded. “Give it up. It’s a piece of crap.”
“No.” He rose into a shaft of water-jeweled light falling through the door. “It will get me out of here,” he told them, going under again. Before Bert could reach him, the boat shifted to a pure horizontal, and the water reached the hot manifolds of the towering port engine, filling the engine room with steam. Bert yelped and jumped for the outstretched hands of his crew, who hauled him up through a muddy waterfall, for the boat was going down, the river storming into the open door. An explosion of steam and trapped air propelled them into deep water, the men clinging together like a raft of ants in a flood. They were swept by the current while the Phoenix III turned over, flashed its corroded propellers, and went down headfirst.
Bert looked over to the geysers of air breaking the river’s surface and tried to think of something to say, but his mind would make no words.
Five minutes later the cook watched the Dixon fleet’s crew boat approach at a chopping roar. “I hope the old man gives us a strong cup of hot coffee before he fires us.” The hull came up to them, and Dixon himself, dressed in a wool suit and overcoat, helped pull them out of the water and hustle them into the small cabin. “Where’s that Renault guy?” he asked, his face flushed and worried.
Same Place, Same Things Page 9