When I headed out the door it was two in the afternoon and drizzling. In that godforsaken suburb there wasn’t anyplace much to walk to. I strolled along by some mud puddles for a while pretending there were fish in them. But there weren’t, so it got depressing. Not that it hadn’t been depressing in the first place. Then I remembered U.S. Grant Creek. It was a suburbanized creek, but it was water. I headed for it.
These suburbs, just a century ago, were a wetland—a wide interlacing of ponds, creeks, sloughs, bogs and meadows providing homes for more mink, muskrat, beaver, ducks, deer, and herons than you’d find in all the Willamette Valley now. But gradually it had been subdivided, drained, filled, imprisoned in pipes, buried alive. U.S. Grant was the only nontroglodyte creek left within miles. And before twenty-four hours passed they may as well have buried it, too… because U.S. Grant Creek was about to die. I know this for a simple reason: I killed it.
U.S. Grant Creek was almost ten miles long, but that didn’t stop me from killing it. I was glad I did it, too—not because I managed to out-macho a thing thousands of times bigger than me, but because I released someone I loved from unending, intolerable misery. I call the creek a “someone” because it was a living body—more a him or a her than an it. But I called it an it after I killed it.
When I was a kid I called it “Sisisicu.” It means “Little, But Strong,” and it had been that creek’s name for centuries. But the white settlers didn’t speak Indian. They didn’t speak it so well they didn’t know the Indians didn’t call themselves Indians, and they never found out what the Indians did call themselves. But the Indians and the creek are dead now, so maybe it didn’t much matter. It’s a funny coincidence that the settlers chose to rename Sisisicu after kind of a “little, but strong” guy—a guy with a stale cigar reek about him, kind of like the creek came to have. It’s almost as if the settlers knew that before their grandchildren were through with Sisisicu, “U.S. Grant” would be a damned good name for it.
The corpse was a big, unwieldy thing—impossible to move and too big to bury. But nobody thought of this till I finished it off, and probably nobody but me thought of it even then. Anyhow, it’s still lying there in the suburbs of Portland—gallons and gallons of slithering liquid carrion. A creek stiff.
It still looks something like a creek. People still call it “creek.” “Don’t play in that filthy creek!” mothers tell their kids. But you know how kids are. They play in it anyway, cutting their hands and feet on the broken glass and shredded metal in it, going to the doctor when the cuts start to fester. It’s a problem of semantics at this point: “creek” isn’t accurate anymore, but there isn’t a word yet for what creeks become once they die. I guess the makers of English didn’t plan on creeks dying. But I think “U.S.G.” is a good name for Sisisicu’s corpse. It’s almost onomatopoeic: has both the prez’s initials and a certain MSG/U.S. Certified Color sort of ring to it.
Slogging along through the drizzle I met the creek in the middle and started hiking upstream. I hadn’t seen it, except from a car, in years; hadn’t fished it since I was twelve; used to catch some nice native cuts and a lot of crawdads in it. But I saw that those days were long gone.… “Water,” according to the Random House Dictionary, has forty definitions ranging from liquid H2O to urine, with cosmetics, adulterated whiskey, and tears in between. Poor Sisisicu looked like it was full of all forty of them. By an uncanny but probably meaningless coincidence, “Dead” also has forty Random House meanings—and most of those also seemed to apply to little Sisisicu. Even in the least frothy rapids the creek foamed at the mouth, dull yellow-brown bubbles coating everything they touched with a rabid scum. I put my hand in—and gloved it with a tepid, oily film that smelled like a hot street.
I kept heading upstream, moved now by a melancholy urge to see the worst, to feel and smell it all. I would journey to the source of my childhood creek. I would find, for better or worse, what had become of the waters of my past.
It was tough going. I was trespassing every step of the way, mostly in suburban backyards—incurring the glares and suspicion of every dog and homeowner. But I kept on: the Indians had no word for “trespassing,” so the trespasses of their neighbors needed no forgiving. And I had walked this riparian before these candy-coated houses ever stood; I had fished this little water; I had loved it. I figured this gave me the right of passage. This pilgrimage was between no one but Sisisicu and me. Whoever made the laws protecting these backyards from intruders made no law to protect Sisisicu from poison, filth, and sewer. They weren’t my laws. To hell with them. I trudged upward, resolute.
I had to leave the water when it passed under streets. This was not in keeping with the self-imposed laws of my pilgrimage, but the culverts reeked, and they were dark, so I crossed the streets and continued my trek on the upstream sides. The rain fell harder.
After a slow, sad two hours I reached a big pipe pouring out of an embankment. At the top of the embankment was a four-lane street running through a wide, flat shopping district. I crossed this street, but no creek continued on the other side. Was this the source—squalid square miles of lots and plots pimpled with real estate offices, fast food chains, gas stations, shopping malls, factories, tickytack churches, funeral parlors, concrete schools? I wasn’t satisfied with such a conclusion. There was water in the pipe. It was coming from somewhere. I would find where.
In the center of the street was a manhole cover. When the traffic lights stopped the flow of cars I ran to it, listened, heard a muffled gurgling. Was this Sisisicu, or just a random sewer? I found a grocery receipt in my pocket. I rolled it into a ball, pried up the manhole cover, dropped it in, ran to the embankment where the pipe poured out: there came the paper, covered with greasy scum. I returned to the street and stumped along from manhole to manhole, checking now and then to be sure Sisisicu still gurgled below. Then I came to a place where the manholes ended but the stream at the curb ran strong: obviously a higher tributary. I followed the gutter stream for half a block, then it vanished into a hole in the curb. I turned slowly in a circle: in every direction the suburb lay lower than where I stood. The only thing higher was the three-story bank building there beside me. It was a Benjamin Franklin bank—a true-to-scale replica of Independence Hall. So, the pipe in the curb must come from the bank. I sighed, sniffed, sucked up my courage, and strode up the walk into the Benjamin Franklin: like a Burton seeking the source of the Nile, I had to make inquiries of the natives. I was rain soaked and creek spattered; my hair and beard were a dripping mess. But this was no time for self-consciousness. I went straight to the manager’s desk.
The manager was a short, broad-beamed fellow with a shiny, good-natured face before he looked me over and a shiny, not-so-good-natured face afterward. He said, “May I help you?”
I said, “Yeah. I’d like to ask a few questions about your building here.”
He nodded coolly: his eyes darted round the room, caught sight of the security guard, and bulged with meaning. Seeing the guard nod, he turned back to me. I asked, “How many floors you got here?”
He frowned. “Three, not counting the basement. All equipped with multiple alarm systems and cameras. Why?”
I grinned as stupidly as possible. “I’m doing a paper for school. About, uh, Independence Hall. This is a model of it, right?”
“Ah!” He smiled like a Sears santa, muzzy with relief. That’s the trouble with lies: they’re so soothing.
“Is there a, um, bathroom, up in the tower?”
He frowned again. “No. But there are several service stations just down the street.”
I turned on the grin. “Oh, I don’t need one. I just need to know.”
It didn’t quite work: he looked at the wet scuz all over me, one side of his face staying where it was while the other side smiled. Out of the diagonal slash of mouth came the word, “Bathrooms.” That was all he said.
“It’s an architecture class,” I lied. “I’m gonna be a plumber.”
He was
soothed again, and his mouth returned to horizontal.
“Any sinks up in the tower?”
“No, no sinks,” he said, helpful now. “No water pipes higher than the faucet on the second floor. Will that be all?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess. Thanks.”
I went back outside and stood in the rain, looking up at the bank, down at the gutter, back at the bank. The pilgrimage felt unresolved. Faucets and toilets go into sewers, don’t they? But Sisisicu had entered that curb, and they don’t pump shit from banks right onto the street. Not yet they don’t. So where had the creek gone?
Then I saw my mistake, realized the interview with the manager was unnecessary, realized my Second-story-faucet Theory was, like Burton’s Lake Victoria Theory, a blunder born of haste.… For up on the bank tower was a replica of the Liberty Bell. And rain poured onto that bell, cohered on it, grew heavy, rolled slowly down the brassy sides, off onto the roof, down the roof to the gutters, to a drainpipe, to a drainfield (and perhaps a buried spring, where deer and Indians once drank), then into and out the underground pipe at the curb. Here was the uttermost source of the waters that had been Sisisicu: an imitation Liberty Bell on top of a mock Independence Hall.
The security guard came out the glass doors and lolled nearby. He looked at the passing cars, at the rain, at the sidewalk to my right, to my left, in front of me, behind me. I could see he was embarrassed; I could see that the manager told him “Keep an eye on that guy,” so he did, because he had to to get paid; I could see he could see past the muck on me; I got the feeling he might even be a fisherman; I got the feeling he might like walking back into that bank all mucky and sopped himself. I said, “See that bell up there?”
He said, “Yeah.”
I said, “It’s the source of a creek. I followed it all the way. U.S. Grant Creek it’s called. The Indians called it ‘Sisisicu.’”
He said nothing.
I pointed at the bell. “Used to catch some nice trout out of there,” I told him.
The security guard looked up at the bell. He was still standing in the rain there, looking up at the bell, when I rounded a corner two blocks away.
9
Closing the Door
The fishermen that walk upon the beach appear like mice.
—Shakespeare, King Lear
That evening at supper Ma and H2O bolted their food till their second helpings, then slowed enough to squabble with their mouths full. I ate fast and cleared out.
I went to my old bedroom to hide till Bill Bob went to bed, but it had been converted into a guest room for visiting Carpers and flyfishermen. It figured. My room was gone; my creek was gone; my parents’ minds were gone; Eddy was gone. I left the house and went walking in the night, but there was nowhere to go. Cars and burbs everywhere. If Titus’s Primordial Tradition wasn’t gone, too, it sure wasn’t easy to spot around here. I almost headed for the highway, thinking to hitchhike home to the Tamanawis, but it was raining, I was exhausted, there was still Tuckin’ Time, and in the morning I wanted to walk to the mouth of U.S. Grant Creek, just to finish off the inspection. So I returned to the house, but circled around back: Ma’s pantry is just inside the back door and it’s a lot nicer walking into a room full of drying herbs, fruits, smoked fish, jars of jam and vegetables than into a hollow shag-carpeted hallway.
But before I reached the door I heard whistling. I stopped to listen: it was a slow, melancholy air, simple, repetitive, haunting. Bill Bob was the whistler. I snuck up to listen. There was something odd in the song; after a time I realized that this was the first time I’d heard him in a minor key. It made him seem old; it made me feel sad. And it made me feel good. Because sometimes happy songs will make sad people miserable, because they feel guilty that they aren’t happy, on top of the sadness. But a sad song talks to the part that hurts, says, Yeah I know, yeah it’s bad, yeah it hurts: but I’m with you. I feel it too.
He was standing in a shadow cast by the spotlight on the porch, engulfed in an enormous coat. It was cold out for summer; you could see your breath. The rain had stopped. The sky was half-full of clouds, half-empty, and a half-moon poured down its half-light half the time. Whistling seemed like an odd thing for Bill Bob to be doing—not because he didn’t often whistle, but because it was only one thing, and he usually did several.
But I watched a good long while, and in the end I saw he was doing several things. I saw that the enormous coat had been mine; I saw that the spotlight on the porch cut a clean, sharp shadow; I saw that Bill Bob stood in that shadow so close to the line of light that his puckered lips sometimes barely touched it, glowing pale and pink when they did; and I saw that he wasn’t just whistling the song: he was watching it. Each slow, sad note sent a bright stream of vapor into the spotlit air.… And then I saw that not only was he watching, he was aiming his song: the high notes he blew downward, the low notes he sent high, the middle ones he blew horizontally. I nearly laughed and ruined the sight. My brother the juggler, balancing everything he did. There he stayed at the edge of the dark, bundled up and buttoned down, satisfied—a dry darkness making wet music stream into the light.
Later I tucked him in. His dreefee was the surf-casting reel, loaded now with four thousand feet of kite string; cleaned, oiled, overhauled, and ready to nab airwaves clear from China. He placed it on his desk beside a model B-52 bomber and ordered it to spend the night “slurpin’ up the bomber’s flyin’ juices” so the bomber wouldn’t be able to bomb anymore, and so the kite would have the juice to fly higher. Then he hopped in bed, lit a candle, flopped on his back, and said, “I’m gonna tell you what my friend Pedro saw.…” But then he cut himself off, sat up, looked at me closely, asked, “What ya been doin’, Gus? How ya been? We ain’t seen ya.”
I said, “Oh, I’ve been all right. I’ve quit fishin’ so much. Made some new friends, you’ll have to meet them. Been swimmin’ a couple times, too.”
“Swimmin’? I thought you didn’t like swimmin’.”
“Well, I don’t much,” I admitted. “But once this guy, Abe, kind of roped me into it. And another time it was this girl, Eddy.…”
“Eddy?” he smiled. “You got a girlfriend, Gus?”
“No,” I said. “So what about this thing Pedro saw?”
He said, “Ever seen Pedro’s place?”
“No.”
“Do you wish your girlfriend was Eddy?”
“What about Pedro’s place?”
“You do, dontcha! She’s pretty, I bet!”
“Prettier than you’re gonna be if you don’t change the subject.”
“There’s eleven of ’em lives in there,” he said.
“Eleven what? Where?”
“People, Dummy. In Pedro’s place. It’s a tiny little house, and it ain’t much good. But Pedro’s got four brothers and four sisters and a mom and a dad livin’ in there with him. And they like it all right. They’re poor. They sleep in tripledecker bunkbeds. I stayed all night once; I got the middle bunk. Why’d ya go swimmin’ with her if she ain’t your girlfriend?”
“Don’t change the subject, Bill Bob. And what was this bullhooey today about musical chairs?”
“Don’t change the subject,” he said. “Pedro’s place don’t have just people in it either. It gots bats in the rafters, and possums under the floor, and a skunk once, and four goats in the garage for milk to drink and for lawn mowers. And it gots mice. That’s what Pedro saw I’m gonna tell you about. A mouse.”
I snorted, “A mouse!”
“Listen, Dummy. I didn’t tell ya what sort of mouse.”
“OK. What sort of mouse?”
He leaned toward me and in hushed tones announced, “A singing mouse!”
“In other words, a squeaking mouse,” I said.
“In the same words, a singing mouse,” he insisted. “Pedro woke up in the middle of the night. The mouse was sitting in a patch of blue-colored streetlight light in the middle of the floor. And it was singing its heart out. Pedro said it sounded lik
e a sad canary.”
“Really?”
“Really. And while it was singing two other mice came out to listen to it. They squeaked a little, and looked at him, and scratched their heads with their hind legs like they couldn’t believe it, and looked at him some more. But they couldn’t sing. But that one mouse sure could.
“So first thing next morning Pedro took away all the mouse traps and made his family promise not to set ’em. And he told ’em to listen that night, but they said they’d be sleepin’, and the way they said it Pedro could tell they didn’t believe about the mouse. But their house is small, so Pedro waited till they were all in bed and he tied strings that went from his finger to all their fingers and told them that if the singing mouse came he’d give the strings a tug. His big brother said what did he think he was, a fish? But he went along with it.
“Just when they were going to sleep Pedro’s dad gave his string a tug from the bedroom, but Pedro told him to knock it off, Dad. He was serious. So they all settled down, and pretty soon all the ones that snore were snoring, and all the ones that sucked their thumbs were sucking their thumbs, and everybody was asleep ’cept Pedro, and he was feelin’ awful sleepy himself. But about when he was going asleep the three mice came out to play, and there were crumbs Pedro left right in the patch of blue streetlight light, and pretty quick they found ’em and ate on ’em. But when they were done they all went away, and none ever sang.
“The next night Pedro tried again with the strings and all, even though they made fun of him, but this time he didn’t leave no crumbs. He said he figured the singing mouse must be like a guitar. Couldn’t get music unless the insides was empty and the gut stretched tight. After everyone was sleeping again, Pedro too, by accident, Pedro dreamed he was a fish, and he bit this worm because it looked and tasted like a beef burrito, and it was a beef burrito, but it was a worm, too, with a hook in it that went through his hand, and he jumped and woke up and someone was tugging on the string: he heard the singing mouse singing! His little sister, Maria, had heard it first and tugged Pedro, then Pedro gave all the other strings some tugs. The singing mouse was all alone in the blue patch of light, sitting up on his back legs like a graydigger does, and singing his heart out. Pedro tugged and tugged. His littlest brother, Juan, woke up, then his mother, who snuck to her doorway and watched and heard. But just when his dad woke up the mouse stopped singing, and Maria and Juan were so disappointed they went ‘Aaawwwww…’ and it ran away. Then everybody woke up and started arguing whether it was squeaking or singing. Pedro’s older brothers had undone their strings and tied dirty socks on for a joke, and his sisters besides Maria were so sleepy they never felt anything, so they all said it was squeaking. But Pedro’s dad said that even though he didn’t hear, everybody who did was sure it was singing, so they won, and Pedro’s mom said it was a blessing to their house and a sign of God’s grace because she’s Catholic.
The River Why Page 24