Telling the Map

by Christopher Rowe

  I don’t know the motive force of the boat. Its motivation is a mystery to me.

  You have to keep an eye on that boat.

  Then it was a John Prine song for four hundred miles.

  Here’s a true story. The Commonwealth of Kentucky owns the Ohio River, or used to. We still own most of it. But then counties along the south bank started charging property taxes to the Hoosiers and the Buckeyes who built docks off the north shore. The Hoosiers and the Buckeyes got their states to sue ours and theirs won, a little bit. Now the Commonwealth owns the Ohio River except for a strip one hundred yards wide along the upper bank. The Supreme Court of the United States decided that.

  Those counties shouldn’t have tried to charge the taxes. They should have known what would happen.

  There doesn’t seem to be much point in owning most of a river.

  These are things I saw along the Ohio River.

  Below Henderson, where the Green gets muddied into the brown, I saw the carcass of a cow, bloated and rotting, floating in the shallows outside the main current. The boat shied away from it even though I was curious to see what kind of cow it was.

  At Owensboro, the water became as clear as air, and I felt like I was flying for a little while. The bed of the Ohio is smooth and broad at Owensboro, unsullied by anything but giant catfish and a submerged Volvo P-1800 in perfect condition.

  Ralph Stanley was playing a concert on the waterfront at Paducah. This time I didn’t mind the boat’s dawdling.

  At Cairo, I floated onto the Mississippi.

  Cairo is pronounced “Cairo.”

  Mark Twain’s mother was born in my hometown. She was married in the front room of the big brick house at the corner of Fortune and Guardian. Mark Twain was conceived there. No, Samuel Clemens was conceived there. I think Mark Twain was conceived in San Francisco.

  Doesn’t Mississippi mean “Father of Waters”? That’s a great name, in the original and in the translation and in the parlance.

  You could make a career on that, I think. “Father of Waters.” If I’d made that up, I would have lorded it over all the other namers for the rest of my life. I would never have named another river.

  So, past New Orleans, the first place I was tempted to stop (but didn’t), and into the Gulf of Mexico. The discharge of the father forced me all the way to the Gulf Stream, and it’s easy to cross an ocean when the currents are doing all the work.

  The boat was showing a little bit of wear, though. I had to drink more wine and patch a few places with the corks.

  It was around then, south of Iceland maybe, north of the Azores, that it occurred to me that I could have used all those bottles to make a boat instead of the corks. It might have been sturdier and I could probably have found some waterproof glue. I think you would have thought of that at the beginning.

  But me, I was south of Iceland, very wet and cold, before I hit my forehead with the heel of my palm.

  “Bottles!” I said.

  The French, in naming rivers and cities and forests and Greek sandwich shops, have the advantage of being French speakers. I only know how to say “I don’t speak French” in French, but I say it with perfect pronunciation and a great deal of confidence. Nobody in France ever believed me. Sometimes even I didn’t believe me.

  So, I don’t know what Seine means, and I’m actually a little bit unsure of the pronunciation. I kept my mouth shut through Le Havre, past Rouen.

  France was the first place along the trip that other people noticed the boat. The French love boats. I know what you think about that kind of sweeping comment. It’s true though, in all it’s implications. All French people love all boats, even ones made out of corks. They might not like them, all of them, all of the time. But love, sure.

  Do you remember when we were on a boat on the Seine together? Cold fog, ancient walls, tinny loudspeakers repeating everything in French, English, German, Japanese?

  Do you remember the other boat? The Zodiac moored under the Pont au Double, lashed against the wall below Notre Dame?

  A man stood in the boat, leaning back, pulling a bright blue nylon rope. People started watching him instead of the church. What was he pulling out of the water? What was the light rising up from below?

  It was another man, a man in a red wetsuit, with yellow tanks strapped to his back, climbing the rope against the current.

  Do you remember that?

  They were still there.

  They waved me over.

  We have underground rivers in Kentucky, too. The Echo is famous, in the caves. If I’d thought of it at the time, I would have tried to coax the boat into the caves when I floated past them, tried to spot some eyeless fish.

  In Paris, the underground river is the Biévre. It enters the Seine right across from Notre Dame. But then it leaves it again. It’s just a river crossing through another one, not joining it.

  I told the man on the boat that I didn’t speak French, in French. He shrugged. Maybe he didn’t care. Maybe he didn’t speak French either. He just pointed at the diver in the water, so I slipped over the side, into the Seine. My boat seemed glad to be rid of me.

  The diver took me by the hand and led me down. Down a very long way. He tied himself to a grating in the side of the stones that formed the channel there and showed me how he’d bent the bars wide enough for someone not wearing air tanks to slip through.

  So I did. I slipped through.

  Then up and out of the Seine, or it might have been the Biévre. I could have been in the secret river the whole time. Up and into a dank passage. I’ve been in dank passages in Paris before, but never any with so few bones.

  No skulls and thighs stacked along the walls here, just a dark stone hallway. I followed it and followed it and came to a junction, a place to choose. Left or right.

  You remember my sense of direction. You wouldn’t have been surprised to know that I knew where I was: at the center of the Ile de la Cité.

  Left was north, then, and I knew that it would take me beneath the police headquarters and up to Sainte-Chapelle, which Louis IX built to store the organs of Jesus after he’d bought them from one of the great salesmen of the thirteenth century. Right was south, to Notre Dame, where signs remind the pickpockets that God’s eyes are on them.

  Notre Dame or Sainte-Chapelle. The lady or the heart.

  I stood there.

  I am standing there still.

  Other than the signs saying that God is particularly aware of petty larceny there, I only remember one thing from inside Notre Dame.

  You were so disgusted when we heard the woman with the Maine accent say, “They’re praying. I didn’t think this was a working church.”

  There were jugglers outside. I didn’t think it was a working church either. I didn’t tell you that.

  When we went to Sainte-Chapelle together, we didn’t go to look for the heart of Jesus. There was a concert, a half-dozen stringed instruments in a candlelit cavern of stained glass. Bach? I don’t remember.

  What I remember was leaving, walking out of the cathedral and into the rain. The line was slow because we had to pass through checkpoints in the Justice Ministry, which surrounds the church. Gendarmes with Uzis below and gargoyles with scythes high above.

  I tracked a stream of rainwater from the mouth of a gargoyle to the pavement. I leaned out, turned my head up, opened my mouth. I told you that I didn’t know what it tasted like. Like limestone, a little. I said limestone or ash, soot or smog.

  You smiled and said, “It tastes like gargoyles.”

  You said that from my description. You didn’t catch the rain on your tongue.

  A long way to come to choose between places I’ve already been. A long way to come to choose anything at all.

  I wonder if I can turn around.

  I wonder if I can find my way back to the boat.

  I wonder if it’s still there.

  The Voluntary State

  Soma had parked his car in the trailhead lot above Governor’s Bea
ch. A safe place, usually, checked regularly by the Tennessee Highway Patrol and surrounded on three sides by the limestone cliffs that plunged down into the Gulf of Mexico.

  But today, after his struggle up the trail from the beach, he saw that his car had been attacked. The driver’s side window had been kicked in.

  Soma dropped his pack and rushed to his car’s side. The car shied away from him, backed to the limit of its tether before it recognized him and turned, let out a low, pitiful moan.

  “Oh, car,” said Soma, stroking the roof and opening the passenger door, “oh, car, you’re hurt.” Then Soma was rummaging through the emergency kit, tossing aside flares and bandages, finally, finally finding the glass salve. Only after he’d spread the ointment over the shattered window and brushed the glass shards out onto the gravel, only after he’d sprayed the whole door down with analgesic aero, only then did he close his eyes, access call signs, drop shields. He opened his head and used it to call the police.

  In the scant minutes before he saw the cadre of blue and white bicycles angling in from sunward, their bubblewings pumping furiously, he gazed down the beach at Nashville. The cranes the Governor had ordered grown to dredge the harbor would go dormant for the winter soon—already their acres-broad leaves were tinged with orange and gold.

  “Soma-With-The-Paintbox-In-Printer’s-Alley,” said voices from above. Soma turned to watch the policemen land. They all spoke simultaneously in the sing-song chant of law enforcement. “Your car will be healed at taxpayers’ expense.” Then the ritual words, “And the wicked will be brought to justice.”

  Efficiency and order took over the afternoon as the threatened rain began to fall. One of the 144 Detectives manifested, Soma and the policemen all looking about as they felt the weight of the Governor’s servant inside their heads. It brushed aside the thoughts of one of the Highway Patrolmen and rode him, the man’s movements becoming slightly less fluid as he was mounted and steered. The Detective filmed Soma’s statement.

  “I came to sketch the children in the surf,” said Soma. He opened his daypack for the soapbubble lens, laid out the charcoal and pencils, the sketchbook of boughten paper bound between the rusting metal plates he’d scavenged along the middenmouth of the Cumberland River.

  “Show us, show us,” sang the Detective.

  Soma flipped through the sketches. In black and gray, he’d drawn the floating lures that crowded the shallows this time of year. Tiny, naked babies most of them, but also some little girls in one-piece bathing suits and even one fat prepubescent boy clinging desperately to a deflating beach ball and turning horrified, pleading eyes on the viewer.

  “Tssk, tssk,” sang the Detective, percussive. “Draw filaments on those babies, Soma Painter. Show the lines at their heels.”

  Soma was tempted to show the Detective the artistic licenses tattooed around his wrists in delicate salmon inks, to remind the intelligence which authorities had purview over which aspects of civic life, but bit his tongue, fearful of a For-the-Safety-of-the-Public proscription. As if there were a living soul in all of Tennessee who didn’t know that the children who splashed in the surf were nothing but extremities, nothing but lures growing from the snouts of alligators crouching on the sandy bottoms.

  The Detective summarized. “You were here at your work, you parked legally, you paid the appropriate fee to the meter, you saw nothing, you informed the authorities in a timely fashion. Soma-With-The-Paintbox-In-Printer’s-Alley, the Tennessee Highway Patrol applauds your citizenship.”

  The policemen had spread around the parking lot, casting clue-nets and staring back through time. But they all heard their cue, stopped what they were doing, and broke into a raucous cheer for Soma. He accepted their adulation graciously.

  Then the Detective popped the soapbubble camera and plucked the film from the air before it could fall. It rolled up the film, chewed it up thoughtfully, then dismounted the policeman, who shuddered and fell against Soma. So Soma did not at first hear what the others had begun to chant, didn’t decipher it until he saw what they were encircling. Something was caught on the wispy thorns of a nodding thistle growing at the edge of the lot.

  “Crow’s feather,” the policemen chanted. “Crow’s feather Crow’s feather Crow’s feather.”

  And even Soma, licensed for art instead of justice, knew what the fluttering bit of black signified. His car had been assaulted by Kentuckians.

  Soma had never, so far as he recalled, painted a self-portrait. But his disposition was melancholy, so he might have taken a few visual notes of his trudge back to Nashville if he’d thought he could have shielded the paper from the rain.

  Soma Between the Sea and the City, he could call a painting like that. Or, if he’d decided to choose that one clear moment when the sun had shown through the towering slate clouds, Soma Between Storms.

  Either image would have shown a tall young man in a broad-brimmed hat, black pants cut off at the calf, yellow jersey unsealed to show a thin chest. A young man, sure, but not a young man used to long walks. No helping that; his car would stay in the trailhead lot for at least three days.

  The mechanic had arrived as the policemen were leaving, galloping up the gravel road on a white mare marked with red crosses. She’d swung from the saddle and made sympathetic clucking noises at the car even before she greeted Soma, endearing herself to auto and owner simultaneously.

  Scratching the car at the base of its aerial, sussing out the very spot the car best liked attention, she’d introduced herself. “I am Jenny-With-Grease-Beneath-Her-Fingernails,” she’d said, but didn’t seem to be worried about it because she ran her free hand through unfashionably short cropped blond hair as she spoke.

  She’d whistled for her horse and began unpacking the saddlebags. “I have to build a larger garage than normal for your car, Soma Painter, for it must house me and my horse during the convalescence. But don’t worry, my licenses are in good order. I’m bonded by the city and the state. This is all at taxpayers’ expense.”

  Which was a very great relief to Soma, poor as he was. With friends even poorer, none of them with cars, and so no one to hail out of the Alley to his rescue, and now this long, wet trudge back to the city.

  Soma and his friends did not live uncomfortable lives, of course. They had dry spaces to sleep above their studios, warm or cool in response to the season and even clean if that was the proclivity of the individual artist, as was the case with Soma. A clean, warm or cool, dry space to sleep. A good space to work and a more than ample opportunity to sell his paintings and drawings, the Alley being one of the other things the provincials did when they visited Nashville. Before they went to the great vaulted Opera House or after.

  All that and even a car, sure, freedom of the road. Even if it wasn’t so free because the car was not really his, gift of his family, product of their ranch. Both of them, car and artist, product of that ranching life Soma did his best to forget.

  If he’d been a little closer in time to that ranching youth, his legs might not have ached so. He might not have been quite so miserable to be lurching down the gravel road toward the city, might have been sharp-eyed enough to still see a city so lost in the fog, maybe sharp-eared enough to have heard the low hoots and caws that his assailants used to organize themselves before they sprang from all around him—down from tree branches, up from ditches, out from the undergrowth.

  And there was a Crow raiding party, the sight stunning Soma motionless. “This only happens on television,” he said.

  The caves and hills these Kentuckians haunted unopposed were a hundred miles and more north and east, across the shifting skirmish line of a border. Kentuckians couldn’t be here, so far from the frontier stockades at Fort Clarksville and Barren Green.

  But here they definitely were, hopping and calling, scratching the gravel with their clawed boots, blinking away the rain when it trickled down behind their masks and into their eyes.

  A Crow clicked his tongue twice and suddenly Soma was
the center of much activity. Muddy hands forced his mouth open and a paste that first stung then numbed was swabbed around his mouth and nose. His wrists were bound before him with rough hemp twine. Even frightened as he was, Soma couldn’t contain his astonishment. “Smoke rope!” he said.

  The squad leader grimaced, shook his head in disgust and disbelief. “Rope and cigarettes come from two completely different varieties of plants,” he said, his accent barely decipherable. “Vols are so fucking stupid.”

  Then Soma was struggling through the undergrowth himself, alternately dragged and pushed and even half-carried by a succession of Crow Brothers. The boys were running hard, and if he was a burden to them, then their normal speed must have been terrifying. Someone finally called a halt, and Soma collapsed.

  The leader approached, pulling his mask up and wiping his face. Deep red lines angled down from his temples, across his cheekbones, ending at his snub nose. Soma would have guessed the man was forty if he’d seen him in the Alley dressed like a normal person in jersey and shorts.

  Even so exhausted, Soma wished he could dig his notebook and a bit of charcoal out of the daypack he still wore, so that he could capture some of the savage countenances around him.

  The leader was just staring at Soma, not speaking, so Soma broke the silence. “Those scars”—the painter brought up his bound hands, traced angles down either side of his own face—”are they ceremonial? Do they indicate your rank?”