The Same River Twice

by Chris Offutt

  “We better do something,” I said.

  “What?” said Luis.

  “It must be fast,” Javier said. “What makes a man run from his bed?”

  “A nightmare.”

  “A rat bite.”

  “A fire.”

  Luis trotted to the kitchen for supplies while his brother soothed the men. The twins brewed a fire in a metal garbage can and blew the smoke through the door into Marduk’s room. A styrofoam egg carton released a particularly vile smell. We heard the thump of feet hitting the floor.

  Still asleep, Marduk left his room bearing an enormous urinary erection. His knee hit the garbage can and cinders scattered across the floor. The Monster steered Marduk to the bathroom like an oak bowsprit and everyone sighed, listening to the heavy blast of urine. He returned with the Monster sagged to half-mast. Marduk stepped on a hot coal and leaped howling into the smoky air. Long black hair slapped his face. His lingam waved like a palm tree in a typhoon, smacking his belly and thighs, sending everyone in a scramble of flight. As the pain faded, Marduk ceased his wild dance, and staggered into bed.

  For the next half hour there was much discussion of what each man would sacrifice to acquire the Monster. Conversation built to a contest until a guy built like an outhouse said he’d give up his life to be buried with such equipment. This silenced the others since nothing could quite top death.

  The Minnesota winter lingered deep into spring, encasing the sky with a sunless gray. Men stiffened at Marduk’s approach as if he were a decorated colonel among fresh troops. Women were brazen with their eyelashes, or quickly turned away. Marduk saw nothing. He worked part-time at the car wash and in the afternoons made tape recordings of his mother’s lessons in traditional life. The weather began to warm. Melted snow ran black along the gutters.

  Luis and Javier had been promoted to money runners for a bookie, and now owned one pistol between them. It was an H&R .22 that held eight rounds. The serial number had been filed off so long ago it had blued over. They took turns carrying the gun but refused to include me in the rotation, saying that as lookout I needed to stay clean.

  The bookie was a large man who ran a numbers racket, and took bets on horse races in Omaha and Chicago. Everyone called him Mister Turf. He operated from a back room in a bar. All morning four phones rang continually. I’d never seen a toupé before and his was so obvious that I inadvertently laughed the first time I saw it. Mister Turf became quite irate until learning where I was from. He assumed that he had an expert on hand, and thereafter referred to me as his Kentuckian, a term that impressed the twins.

  Mister Turf was angry with the city of Minneapolis, which had betrayed him by opening construction on a racetrack in a nearby suburb. Legal gambling would ruin him. Before that occurred, he was intent on saving a stake large enough to start a female mud-wrestling club.

  I trailed after Luis and Javier like a pesky younger brother, doing whatever they asked, which was mainly waiting by a pay phone to prevent anyone from using it. After two rings, I picked it up, said “Red dog” into the receiver, and hung up. If the phone rang again, I answered it and wrote down the muttered message—a string of coded numbers. One of the brothers picked up the note and carried it to Mister Turf. Since paper and pencil were required, I had freedom to write in my journal, a practice that slowly began to supersede every aspect of my life. As long as I was able to record events, my shoddy circumstances didn’t matter. I began making outlandish statements to passersby simply to provoke a response worthy of logging.

  The brothers and I drank every night, and enjoyed free meals in a variety of bars. I ate tongue, dog, horse, and millions of black beans. We planned another fiesta del monstruo, but our pleasant life was interrupted by the sudden arrival of Luis and Javier’s cousin María.

  She was eighteen, lacked legal papers, and was staying with their aunt across town. Aunt Tiamat had been a successful prostitute in the Ecuadorian capital of Quito but was shrewd enough to retire early. Since emigrating to America, she’d helped family members follow, The twins owed her their current bandit status. They, along with others she’d brought to America, gave her a percentage of their income.

  The brothers were determined that I should marry Maria. My shocked refusal meant nothing. They assured me that she was a virgin. At night they plied me with a higher grade of liquor. Hadn’t they taken me in like a brother? Wasn’t I at this moment drinking their rum?

  I explained my devotion to Jennipher in Kentucky, They didn’t believe me and made veiled suggestions about my secret racism. I hauled out the wrinkled photo of Jennipher as proof. It was from the sixth grade, when we passed notes reading, “Do You Like Me? Check Yes or No.” Her apparent youth upped my waning masculine status. They were stymied until Luis grinned and smacked his brother out of his chair. He spoke rapidly in Spanish, then switched to English.

  “That is not here, Kentucky! You can be married in this country and that is one thing. You can have a wife in another country and that is another thing!”

  “No, Luis,” I said. “Kentucky is in the U.S.”

  “Now you are lying, Chrissie. You have told us the stories of your country. It is warm and in the mountains. It is far away. The people go in the dirt and make coal.”

  “We understand that you are nervous,” Javier said. “A man is always nervous before his wedding.”

  “Tomorrow Chrissie will meet María,” Luis said to his brother, helping him stand. “Tonight we drink!”

  The next morning I awoke hung over and filled with dread. The boys briefed me on Ecuadorian etiquette, which I was determined to violate, thereby dodging matrimony by sheer rudeness. Near dusk we walked the several blocks to Aunt Tiamat’s house. Luis and Javier were edgy, intimidated by the prospect of visiting their infamous aunt. I felt calm, knowing that my sojourn in Minneapolis was nearly over.

  Aunt Tiamat was tall and elegant and moved with a predatory grace. She was heavy but well proportioned, carrying her weight with the nobility of a veteran wearing medals. She dressed with bold sensuality while obeying the confines of decorum. Cleavage was a reminder, not an invitation. Everyone chatted in Spanish and I nodded like an imbecile. Aunt Tiamat bowed to me and left the room.

  “Now you will meet Maria,” Luis whispered.

  “She is our cousin.”

  “Aunt Tiamat is our aunt.”

  “You are stupid!” Javier said. “Chrissie is not stupid. He knows who is who.”

  Outside, a freight train moved through town, its whistle a sound of mourning. I was trapped without a Cumberland Gap in sight, stuck like Boone with a local squaw.

  Aunt Tiamat glided regally into the room and presented Maria like a valuable flintlock in red high heels. She was petite and brown with a breast-tilt that defied gravity. Each ankle was thin as a worry line. María was at her maiden’s peak and I knew how Daniel had felt when he saw the purity of untouched land.

  Luis and Javier stood stiff-backed as southern gentlemen until Aunt Tiamat dismissed them with a slight gesture of her wrist. They sidled out the door, winking at me. She led Maria away and returned to pour two brandies. After a sip, she spoke.

  “María says she is in love with you.”

  “What!”

  “Because you will marry her.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You must.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she is in love with you.”

  For a few minutes I pondered the idea, thinking of those red high heels. I could pass her off as Shawnee in Kentucky and we’d live on rice and beans. My family would understand. We’re flexible in the hills. One of Rebecca Boone’s babies was fathered by Daniel’s brother, the penalty for her husband’s wandering.

  Aunt Tiamat refilled our glasses. Regardless of Maria’s beauty, I didn’t want a wife of convenience. As businessmen, Luis and Javier could understand my refusal, but they’d consider it a betrayal of their aunt’s decree, a stake higher than their own honor. It was time to use the less
ons they’d taught me.

  “Marduk is better,” I said. “He’s learning Spanish.”

  “Who?”

  “The Indian. You know.”

  I spread my hands to indicate size. Her eyes narrowed and the glass trembled slightly in her hand.

  “El monstruo,” she said.

  “Yup.”

  “It is true?”

  “Yup.”

  “He would be too much for María.”

  “But not for you. He could marry Maria and live here. Shell get citizenship.” I stepped close, dizzied by her perfume, and slowly flipped my hole card.

  “Marduk has never been with a woman.”

  Aunt Tiamat gripped a chairback, her eyes wide as castanets. A faint seam of perspiration gleamed along her upper lip.

  “Take me to him,” she said. “You must keep my nephews away this night.”

  She telephoned for a taxi and didn’t speak during the ride. I let her in our hovel. She handed me a wad of bills and shooed me away. In a nearby bar Luis and Javier were drinking with a pair of neighborhood hookers. The brothers met me at the door.

  “It’s settled,” I said. “Aunt Tiamat gave me money to celebrate. How much do they want?”

  We looked across the dim room at the whores.

  “Twenty,” said Luis.

  “And mine is worth thirty.”

  “Then I believe,” Luis said, “that mine is worth forty.”

  “Mine wants forty-five.”

  “You two stay here,” I said.

  For a hundred bucks and a bottle of rum, the women promised to keep them until noon the next day. Luis hugged me. Javier hugged me, then kissed me on the cheek. Luis pushed his brother aside, lifted me off the floor, and kissed me on both cheeks. Javier reached for me. I ran for the door, wiping beer spittle off my face. Boone probably kissed a favorite hound dog but never another man.

  In the street I realized that I had nowhere to go for the night, and would have to leave town. I snuck into our apartment for my belongings. Marduk’s bed thumped in time to his wailing Chippewa song, Geb finally opening the matrix of Nut. I filled my backpack and walked across town beneath a full moon flat as a tortilla in the cloudless sky. Maria opened the door.

  “Mi novia,” she murmured.

  I embraced her and we mangled each other on the couch. Either Maria had lied to the twins or they had lied to me; she was no virgin. We fit together like Lincoln logs. When the calamity was over and Maria lay nestled against me, I began thinking of water and movement. Tomorrow Minnesota and its thousand lakes would be one more place to which I’d never return.

  Daniel Boone came home once a year to rest, resulting in sixteen kids. The same year that Kentucky honored him by giving a county his name, two sheriffs stole ten thousand acres of his land to sell for taxes. He left the state in 1799, feeling crowded by the appearance of a new neighbor twenty miles away. At age eighty-five, he died the hero’s death—choking to death on a sweet potato.

  Rising at sunup, I dressed and fixed a cup of coffee, Maria found me in the kitchen lacing my boots. Sunlight polished her mahogany skin and winked on the curls below her flat belly. Chilly air starched her nipples. She stepped forward, slapped me across the face, kissed me quickly, and ran from the room. The ghost of Daniel whispered that I should leave. Not being Quaker like Boone, Luis and Javier’s method of vengeance might include all eight bullets from the little .22. I stepped into the dawn streets and walked to the meat market, where a trucker carried me west.

  Summer for me has always been a time of hibernation, a hallucinatory season to be endured. This one is passing in a fury of photosynthesis and intimacy. Rita has kept her job for the insurance, while her belly grows. A small magazine has accepted a short story and sent me a check for fifty-four dollars. It’s my third publication, the first that paid. Rita is happy. The check validates her decision to have a child with me, proves that my days as a bum are gone. I take her to town for dinner. The bill is low since Rita is eating five small meals a day instead of three large ones.

  The rest of the money buys fabric to make curtains for the baby’s room. After borrowing a sewing machine, I manage to produce two hemmed strips that will fit no window in the house. They hang at a slant. Sunlight borders the sides; the bottom is eight inches below the windowsill. I am prouder of them than of getting published.

  Every morning I take coffee to the river and sit in the same chair where I ended the previous night with beer, I prop my feet on a sandbag left from the flood. Now, in late July, drought is killing the corn, and the river has dwindled to a creek. The morning stillness is broken only by the symphony of birds claiming turf, and my neighbor’s boat as he checks his catfish lines. To him the river is a tool. He’s trapped and fished it for two decades.

  Twenty-five hundred years ago, a Greek named Heraclitus said, “You can’t step into the same river twice.” I climb down the bank and remove my shoes and socks. The river is warm on my skin, a continuous flow that is immediately gone, yet remains. The water surrounding one leg is not the same as around the other leg. Sediment drifts away and it occurs to me that you can’t even step on the same bank twice. Each footstep alters the earth.

  Heraclitus is known as “the Obscure” because none of his writings survived. My neighbor has no use for his ideas. To him the river is always the same, moving past his house, providing food. He steps into it every day. He gauges the spots to set his poles by the texture of mud beneath his feet. I spread my legs as far as I can. One foot is Heraclitus, the other is my neighbor. I am floating somewhere in between. Wind in the high boughs makes the leaves ripple like water, producing a distant whisper. Fish eggs cling to rock along the shore.

  Rita’s eggs are thirty-four years old. She wanted amnioscentesis to eliminate the worry of producing a baby less than perfect. Her uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandparents all died in World War II—some in combat, some in death camps. Rita can never be sure what genetic oddities run in the family. Her feet are flat and she has dyslexia. One of my eyes is farsighted, the other nearsighted. As a kid, I had big teeth bucked so badly that four molars were yanked to make room.

  Standing in the river, I imagine DNA as something large and visible, extending from throat to navel, full of unruly tangles that produce cowlicks, walleyes, and pinheads. I was against the test, afraid that if our child turned out damaged, it would mean that I was too. Even worse, if the results showed a Down’s baby, I would want to keep it anyway. The test is for throwing it back.

  Rita prevailed and two weeks ago, we went to the hospital. She was told to drink sixteen ounces of juice. Half an hour later a nurse strapped her to a table. Above Rita’s head sat a sonogram screen that would monitor the probing of her gut. The nurse lifted Rita’s shirt, pulled her pants down, and swabbed her belly with a clear gel. She nodded to the doctor, another woman, who pressed an ultrasound transducer to Rita’s stomach. The sonogram screen filled with a murky, mobile image that looked nothing like a child. The white areas were tissue, the black was fluid. The spine looked like a zipper. The doctor measured the skull and thigh. She checked the heart, which was working fine. Flowing along the top of the image were horizontal layers of uterine wall and placenta, bringing to mind a summer sunset, changing with the light of the heart.

  The doctor manipulated the sonogram until two vertical images bisected the screen. She froze one, enlarged the other, and took photographs. “There’s a hand,” she said, indicating a pale blot. “We’re looking at the baby as if it was sitting in a chair and we’re underneath. It’s mooning us. The legs are crossed, so we can’t see the genitals. It’s shy.”

  I watched the screen, trying to see as the doctor did, but found only a shifting landscape of black and white, a bubbling tar pit that caught light and held bones. “It looks good,” she said. “Fifteen-point-nine weeks along.”

  She pressed several buttons and changed the image to a cone that represented a three-dimensional cross section inside Rita’s belly. As the doctor mov
ed the transducer, the image in the cone changed. She was hunting for a large space, far from the fetus, close to the amniotic wall. “There’s one,” she said. “Perfect.”

  The screen showed a dark gap surrounded by gray and white like an astronomical photograph. The nurse handed her a syringe. The needle was very long, a beak. She used both hands to insert it into a guiding tube that was pressed tight to Rita’s belly. Rita closed her eyes. The doctor watched the monitor, moving her hands by rote, pushing the needle into darkness.

  “Tenting,” she said, and the nurse repeated the word. I asked what it meant.

  The nurse explained that the amnion was tough enough to resist the needle; it was like pressing a stick against the wall of a tent. After several tries, the doctor breached the amnion. The syringe sucked pale liquid into its chamber, and I had a sudden impulse to drink it. My knees felt trembly. A gray fog crowded my vision. The nurse took my arm and led me to a chair, advising me to place my head between my legs. She cleaned Rita’s stomach. The final image on the monitor showed a section of Rita’s interior in the shape of a cornucopia, the horn of life.

  We drove home and Rita went to bed. For two hours I watched her sleep. The baby was missing an ounce of life already, a shot glass of amniotic fluid, and I was afraid that it might notice. We had taken its water away, like drought. I sat on the bed and apologized to Rita’s belly for our invasion.

  The two-week wait went slowly. Today’s mail should contain the results of our amnio. I leave the river and climb the bank to my chair. Maples crowd the opposite bank, their leaves tinted yellow by lack of rain. The yard is brown and I think of lush summers in the hills at home. The grass is always greener where people die young. Our child is an underground spring straining at the confluence of Rita and me. The amnio will tell us if it’s polluted.

  The river is sinking like a lost continent, a misplacement for which we all suffer. Yesterday I took the boat out, but a light breeze halted me in a holding pattern between current and wind. I had to wade home, pulling the boat with a rope, wondering how much further the river can shallow itself. Maps show it as a thin blue line the color of a vein until oxygen turns it the hue of mud. Should drought drink all the water, the other side of the river would still be this side. Herons would lose their safety, and bridges would have no meaning. If the waterways lay empty to the sea, the ocean would run backwards into the vacant riverbeds, rubbing salt against the open wounds of earth. Drought and flood, that slow sabotage of the soul, would never matter again. The dam that holds nothing back becomes a tombstone for the river.