The Same River Twice

by Chris Offutt

  “Maybe I took a vow.”

  “I think you’re scared.”

  “The only thing I’m scared of is snakes.”

  “Look, Chris. You better start writing or you’ll wind up like me.”

  The words had flowed without prior thought and I watched their meaning seep into him. Shadrack seemed to shrivel. Very slowly he pushed his beer glass off the table. It shattered against the floor. There was deliberation in the act, rather than violence; the careful work of controlled passion. He leaned across the table, his voice a hard whisper.

  “That’s poetry, my friend. That’s how you write it.”

  He handed me the towel as if he were a master of tae kwon do granting a star pupil the highest belt.

  “Now leave me alone,” he said. “Go write.”

  The bartender walked over and I apologized, offered to pay for the glass. Shadrack was gone and I hadn’t seen him leave. We’d argued before, often mightily, but this time there was a finality to his calm. I thought about our past conversations, his view of the artist as shaman. He considered the process of making art to be holy. Shadrack had given me permission and now he was gone.

  During the next nine weeks, I faced my typewriter and never wrote a word. I rolled a fresh page into the machine and stared like a statue for fifteen hours. At the day’s end I placed the blank page to the right of my typewriter. My mind was a tornado. I ceased to bathe, eat, or shave. I simply continued to write without writing.

  My brain began to operate in a lucid fashion, seeing details of memory melting into dialogue. I was invigorated by the electrical crossfire in my head. On particularly luminous days, my brain pulsed in a state of ecstasy. The moment I awoke, I rushed to use it, sliding into the marvelous oblivion of self-content, flowing with the same aimless delight of hitchhiking. My mind entered the blank white page to observe myself: a thin skin bag over a fragile gantry of bone. Cartilage hinged the moving parts.

  Mail ruined my discipline, bringing a birthday card from my mother. Without quite noticing, I had become thirty years old. I went out for a pint of bourbon, drank it too fast, and got sick. I was in that panting, sweaty state when men swore off alcohol, bargained with God, and resolved to hold a job. I had done it many times. Though I refused to admit failure, I was certainly engaged in failing. The time had come to squirrel a grubstake and leave Boston.

  I called the personnel office at the Grand Canyon and was told that the hiring was over, but that I should try the Everglades. It had a late season. I called Flamingo, Florida, and reached a man named Bucky. He said there was an opening for a Naturalist.

  “What are your qualifications?” he asked.

  “I grew up in the woods.”

  “Well, we need a tour guide, Ours had an accident. Have you been down here before?”

  “Sure,” I lied.

  “I’ll pick you up in Florida City. Call me when you get there. I need a break from this swamp.”

  I bought a book about South Florida and spent the evening looking at photographs of paradise. Every animal native to North America lived there. The Everglades seemed like Kentucky with alligators and a beach.

  The night before leaving, I nailed my towel to the door of Shadrack’s studio, with a note telling him my plans. I decided to celebrate with a drink at one of Boston’s slickest bars. The acrylic stools were shaped like swans. On one wall hung a liquor poster urging “the art of lingering.” Cooking, war, and flower arrangement had all been elevated to the status of art, and it occurred to me that the high arts had responded by demoting themselves to craft. I decided this was why I wasn’t writing.

  I went home and filled a glass with bourbon and frothing tap water. The alcohol killed the chlorine that killed the germs. This was a good old day. In New England I had no more found America than Columbus had. He died obscure, humiliated, and a trifle cracked. His bones were dug up three times, finally ensconced in a lighthouse in the Dominican Republic. At the tip of Florida, I’d be fairly close.

  I rode the commuter train to 1-95, a straight shot to Florida. Boston faded into morning smog—Bunker Hill’s phallic monument that commemorated the wrong neighborhood, the icy sliver of the Hancock building, a harbor full of poison. My backpack contained spare clothes and a blank notebook with the word “Poetry” scrawled on the cover. Ponce de León had grown old traipsing Florida for the Fountain of Youth; perhaps I could find the Well of Age.

  Half a dozen pillows prop Rita’s swollen body on the couch. The woman I married has been replaced by an incubator with powers of speech and thought. A blithering numbskull has replaced her husband. Our sole heat is a woodstove that warms the ceiling and leaves pockets of cold in the corners. Ice has formed on the windows inside the house. The baby has dropped. Its head is positioned correctly, nudging Rita’s pelvic exit. Her belly has tilted forward and she breathes more easily, but the change in her center of gravity affects her balance. She moves like a drunk. I scatter salt from the door to the car. It melts through snow in hundreds of tiny pocks.

  After agreeing easily to a girl’s name, Rebecca Marie, we fought over what to call a boy. I want a common name that is still uncommon, an older name, one of strength, such as Oak or Thor. Rita eschews my ideas as ridiculous. Her names are fine, Ben, Jared, Lucas, but I didn’t think of them first. We make lists, writing each name on an index card, granting the other power of veto. It is like choosing a jury; we both add token names to our list for the other to deny. The rest go into separate stacks of yes, no, and maybe. The no pile is the biggest.

  My father and brother share the same name, being the fifth and the sixth respectively. If we have a boy, both have urged me to use their name, continuing a line that runs to the Civil War. Rita’s father would prefer us to name a boy after his brother who died in World War II. The name is Jack, which does not jibe with my last name. Before I understood the meaning, I engaged in grade school fistfights with boys who called me that. When I make fun of the name, Rita begins to weep. After all, it is her dead uncle I’m laughing at. I apologize and prowl the house like a caged animal until she sends me to the woods.

  Morning shadows are blue in the snow. Winter is a bell, a long peal of silence through the floodplain woods. Every horizontal surface is blanked white and my bad knee aches. The river is frozen along the bank, forming a white border for its flow. The ice on both sides slowly meets in the middle, joining like Rita and me on a name. The center of the river is the first to thaw. It gradually breaks itself until it reaches the shore, leaving silver shelves of ice protruding from the bank.

  The woods are black and white, like an old photograph. I know the names of trees but they are only words. The Sac Indians said that kaintuck meant “river of blood.” According to them, Eastern Kentucky was filled with the ghosts of its previous inhabitants, an ancient race slaughtered to the last child. The Sac were astonished that white people would want to homestead the hills. The name itself prevented their own people from living there.

  The oldest recorded personal name is En-lil-ti, carved into a Sumerian tablet from 3300 B.C. “Rita” is a Sanskrit word, meaning “brave” or “honest.” My name means “bearer of Christ,” a troublesome burden. When I was a child, Saint Christopher was removed from sainthood and I thought that meant he was bad, that I was impugned by his inadequacy. I decided to change my name but the family objected. Unbound by such fetters, a Hindu will choose a new name to mark significant personal change. Cherokee people may change their names several times to suit their personalities at different stages of life. I want a son’s name to suit him so well he’ll want it for life.

  At the river’s edge I begin tracking a deer. The prints are coming my way, which means I’m not following the deer but trailing it in reverse, going where it came from. The snow inside each print is compacted but loose, a fresh trail. I find where the animal ducked a low branch, knocking snow from the bough. I duck under it too. The tree limb brushes my back as it brushed the deer. The tracks end on a slight rise forty yards from
the river at a spot that is protected from wind. An oval swatch of earth is imprinted in the snow. The deer slept here last night, melting the snow beneath it. I’ve found where it sleeps, giving me a power as ancient as knowing a wizard’s name.

  I crouch at the perimeter and retrieve a few lost hairs. They are stiff bristles an inch long, two of which are tipped in white. I push them into my beard and lie in the bed of the deer. Its heavy musk clings to the dirt, full of mystery and strength. In the fifth century, Parmenides said, “All things are a name where mortals lie down.” The bottoms of trees fill my vision, becoming a solid wall in the distance. I pull into a tighter ball. The ground is cold against my face. I try to imagine sleeping through the darkness here, comfortable with the sounds of night, waking at first light. Tree limbs interlace around me, edged with snow that’s white as milk.

  In olden times, women gave the children names, an act connected with lactation. Eating was evidence of life, and life demanded a label. Since the men didn’t nurse, they were excluded from the process of naming. French women still give infants a milk name, a temporary appellation while the child is nursing. This name embodies the soul and is kept secret. Inuit society requires a three-day waiting period before naming a newborn. They want to examine it first, ensure that its presence is acceptable to the community. Until the baby is named, it is not considered human.

  I realize that I’m quite cold. My weak knee throbs, my bad ear aches. I haven’t been lying here very long and already I’m uncomfortable. The recognition of such simple failure is worse than my fears of being a lousy father. I uncurl and rise, moving through the timber. Wind off the river scorches my face. I think of Adam, the unremitting pressure of naming every creature. Each word he uttered became a noun.

  A beaver-downed tree spreads its branches along the ice where the river touches land. The current carries hundreds of small fish along the surface. Most are dead, but a few still struggle with feeble fins. A dozen float in a pool formed by a beaver dam, and I wonder if they are of the same spawn, born and dying together. I imagine being in the woods with my children, and realize that I’m already thinking in the plural, although we have yet to name the first. The baby Rita carries will need an ally against me. A backup prevents extinction. This need for another name reduces the pressure of choosing one now. Like Adam, I have room for error.

  More dead fish are floating by, tiny and silver, the shape of a spearpoint. Life will divide siblings as surely as a dam divides the river. The Hindu goddess Bindumati parted the Ganges, and Isis divided the Phaedras River. Moses came late to the myth. He suffered a speech impediment and relied on his brother’s eloquence until they entered the wilderness and began to disagree. Thinking of Aaron’s magic rod, I use a forked stick to lift a fish from the river. A black spot behind each eye marks it as a gizzard shad, a fragile creature that cannot sustain sudden changes in temperature. Thousands die every year, entire clans wiped out. Our child will never have a big brother or sister, nor wear hand-me-downs. I place the shad on the log for a possum or coon. Nothing dies before its time.

  Beneath the snow is a layer of last fall’s leaves, and walking it is like treading upon a mattress. The ground is marked by deer print and droppings. I remove my glove and squeeze a pellet between thumb and forefinger. It’s soft, still warm. I’m close.

  When I stop at the edge of a clearing, a deer lifts its head to watch me with the bold curiosity of a raccoon. Direct eye contact is a sign of aggression that will scare most animals, and I turn my head, looking to the side of the deer. We share the gift of acknowledgment. It will outwait me because there is no time in the woods, only life and rot, with weather at the edges. I have never owned a watch. Time is a Rorschach folded into a Möbius strip turned inside out, upside down. Time is the name we give to living. Modern science presents us with kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species—designating every organism on the planet. Once identified, it is ours, as with a nickname known only to a private few. Quantum physics has taken to naming the theoretical, much like concocting a name for an unborn infant. Nothing exists that is not labeled; like killing, it is our assertion over the world.

  The deer I’m watching moves to nibble a branch, accustomed to my shape among the trees and brush. Something immobile is not a threat. The deer looks back at me occasionally and I imagine that it recognizes its fur in my beard. My cheek begins to itch but I refuse to scratch it and drive the deer to flight. Many eons ago, the name was identical with the thing itself, a method of comprehension. The word “deer” comes from the Old English “deor,” meaning “beast.” Gradually the word moved from the general to the specific. A beast became the deer. The present denudes the past.

  In Sanskrit, naman means both “name” and “soul.” Dogs, cats, and horses receive our patronizing gift of a name because they knuckle under us. My mother talks to her houseplants and gives them names. Language protects us, the foremost tool of the weakest mammal. To name is to know, the first step of identity. One child, one name; the grafting of the soul.

  A crow angles into a hickory and perches with its bill parted, a young bird’s habit from the nest, waiting for food. When I turn my head to look at it, the deer flees, tail raised like a flag of surrender. Its abrupt flight startles me. I sense its fear, a feeling that I fill with my own sudden panic. I hurry across the hardened earth, certain that Rita is giving birth.

  My panting entrance to the house awakens her on the couch. She’s had no contractions. The baby has dropped, but its head has not yet engaged, still floating in its private amniotic river. I bring Rita juice and sit beside her, waiting like the crow for the sustenance of life. We settle on a name. If it’s a boy, we’ll call it Sam and worry about the particulars later.

  Rita stretches her arms for a hug, breasts swollen, hair silken on my face. The smell of fresh-split white oak fills the house. We lie on the couch all day, watching early darkness cloud the air. I press my belly against hers, feel the baby move. The moon hangs round and white as a fresh tree stump. I feed the fire, knowing that our child’s birth will drive a velvet wedge between us. We’re less lovers than partners now, old buddies facing weather, followers of habit. We’ve spread our wings and mated for life. She has taken my name.

  Two days after leaving Boston, I slept beneath a picnic table at a rest stop in Grizzard, Virginia, My body was stiff but I felt an adrenalized state of grace. The crammed sprawl of the Northeast lay behind me, I was bound for the southernmost tip of continental America, a gigantic swamp, a river of grass. I decided to give up alcohol and dope. The Everglades would be my detox center, a monastery. I was certain to live there the rest of my life.

  An independent trucker stopped because he needed someone to keep him awake. Twenty hours later he dropped me off just south of Jacksonville, where I watched hundreds of drivers cruise along 1-95 without so much as glancing my way. I walked several miles to the intersection of A1A and found a message on a road sign. Scratched into the shiny metal back, as if by a dying man writing his own epitaph, were these words: “Worst place in USA to get a ride. 3 days here. Fuck Florida. Fritz.”

  Below that ran an equally chilling ledger of the road:

  3 days—Will

  27 hours—Schmitty

  17 hours—Larry

  21/2 days—Pablo

  32 hours—Phil

  1 day, 4 hours, 18 minutes—Pete the Tick

  At the very bottom of the sign, carved with a wavering hand, was the finale: “You’re stuck, brother. Kick back, smoke dope, get high.”

  Until a few thousand years ago, Florida was under water, making it the world’s most recent substantial landmass to emerge. Reading that sign made me wish it had remained in the sea. The lovely resort town of Flamingo was better than four hundred miles away. I decided to buck the odds, trust whichever goddess watched over vagrants and swamplands, and hang my thumb to the wind. To dodge the sun, I stood in the sliver of shadow cast by the sign. Seven hours later I was still there, bug-chewed, deliriou
s from the heat, facing the flip side of freedom—the numb despair of immobility.

  Nine miles east lay the ocean, an eternity of light-years away. The rest of the continent spread above me like a fan. I realized that I had no idea what I was up to, in fact never had. Twelve years after leaving Kentucky, I was still roving the twentieth century, ineluctably alone and no better at it, merely accustomed to the circumstance. The West was fenced, Everest climbed, and Africa plumbed. Even Tibet had white men moving through it like a plague. Thumbing was a pathetic substitute for adventure. As a young man, I’d found this means of travel ideal, but now I was thirty, beyond the excuse of youth. For the first time in my life, I felt aged.

  I crossed the highway, turned north, and was picked up by an old fisherman hauling a tin skiff in a pickup. The back third of the boat hung from the truck. He made me sit in the boat. As soon as we crossed into Georgia, I banged on the window and hopped out. He gave me half a can of bug spray, the most useful gift I’ve ever received. By dawn, the can was empty and I no longer bothered to scratch the bites that covered my body. The flesh around my eyes was swollen to blindness. When I staggered from the brush, two college boys stopped their car. They seemed disappointed that I was a victim of insects rather than a dope deal gone sour. Out of pity they allowed me passage to Florida.

  In Miami I caught a bus to Florida City. The driver spoke no English, which explained why so many New Yorkers moved there—they felt at home. Florida City was the last town before the Everglades, and I wondered vaguely how I’d ever get out of Flamingo once I reached it. Wet air sopped against me like a sponge. I went to the bus station and called Bucky, who said he was on his way. An old man chewing snuff sat behind the ticket counter. I told him I was going to the Everglades. He unleashed a stream of tobacco that spattered a stained wall.

  “No you ain’t,” he said.

  “I got a job there.”