The Same River Twice (20 page)

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.

T
wo 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

2
¹
/
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, delirious 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.”

“You ain't going there.”

“Why not?”

“You're in the Glades already.”

I went outside to wait for Bucky. From the edge of town, the monotonous landscape of saw grass and sedge spread in every direction, devoid of humanity's imprint. Above the low treeline was a pale gray sky. A mosquito bit me. Gradually and then in a rush I realized that the manner in which I'd been hired was unusual. As the humidity collided with my body and dampened my clothes, I wondered if coming to Florida in August was somewhat of an error. I had sixty dollars in my sock, enough to get somewhere else. I studied my map. With Lake Okeechobee as its eye, Florida looked like a turtle poking its head from the shell of America. From another angle, the state resembled a scarred and flaccid lingam, and I was headed for its tip. The wrinkled map was horribly familiar. If I left, I didn't know where to go. I'd lived in or passed through most of the country already.

A short, stocky man in a cowboy hat parked his truck at the curb.

“God double damn,” he said. “Civilization! Are you Chris?”

I nodded. He studied my swollen face.

“Well, you don't look too natural for a Naturalist.”

Bucky handed me a can of mosquito repellent and we drove twenty miles along a narrow blacktop road that wound through clumps of mangrove and endless saw grass. He pointed out landmarks that were little more than bumps—Mahogany Hammock, Long Pine Key, a scenic overlook that was three feet high. Snakes lay in the road, drawing warmth from the tar. Huge birds flashed overhead.

The road opened into the most pathetic outpost erected since Ponce de Leon's first camp. Flamingo's main building had two stories with an open breezeway overlooking the bay. Below that lay a dock. Strung along the coast was a succession of low ratty cabins, each having settled into the soft earth at a different pitch and yaw. Bucky sprayed himself with repellent, opened the truck, and ran to the nearest door.

Though it was daylight, there was no one in sight and no cars in the lot. A pulley clanked on a naked flagpole. I had the feeling that reality had slipped: I'd been slaughtered on the interstate and this was a particularly malevolent form of afterlife. When I left the truck, a squad of mosquitoes found my neck and face. I ran to the mysterious door, jerked it open, and stumbled inside.

“Jeezum Crow,” Bucky said. “Don't let the swamp in.”

He slammed the door and we spent the next couple of minutes killing mosquitoes. He gave me an official Naturalist shirt, the price of which would come out of my pay. He assigned me a room, and told me the employee dining hours. Room and board would also be deducted. I asked if we got paid in scrip, but he didn't get the joke.

“You missed supper,” Bucky said. “See Captain Jack after breakfast.”

“Where is everybody?”

“Who?”

“Anybody.”

“No tourists today. The employees stay mostly indoors.” He shook my hand. “Welcome to the swamp.”

I got my pack and ran to my room, sustaining several bites while working the key. There was a dank bathroom, two double beds, and a sliding glass door that offered a ground-level view of the ocean a hundred yards away. Wet air stifled the room and mildew grew in the corners. I turned on the air conditioner, which pumped a weak stream of warm air.

I unpacked and began to read the Florida book, rather than merely looking at the photographs as I had in Boston. Altitude was measured in inches. The fruit of the manchineel tree was water-soluble and so extremely toxic that taking shelter from rain beneath its boughs would poison you. I had voluntarily entered the most hostile environment known to man. Ponce de León had spent most of his time on the island of Bimini, and now I understood why.

A consistent banging woke me at dawn. Bucky stepped inside wearing a bathrobe, cowboy hat, and boots.

“Can you cook?” he said.

I shook my head.

“Know anybody who can?”

“I just got here.”

“Right, right, the Naturalist. Forget breakfast, the cook quit. The boat's broke down, so there's no work for you today. Lucky bastard.”

The
Heron
was a flat-bottomed scow with ten rows of benches beneath an awning. In the morning light that filtered through mist rising from the swamp, the boat looked as seaworthy as a brick. The hull showed a thick covering of algae and scum that clung like tattered lace to the wood. I'd traveled sixteen hundred miles to love my boat, planning to call it “she,” and found the crone of the triple goddess. The most one could say of the
Heron
was that she might not leak.

A motorcycle honcho named Dirt concluded that to fix the motor, he'd have to pull it from the boat. I offered to help. We balanced the motor on the wide rail of the boat and began inching it onto the pier. Lateral pressure pushed the boat away from the dock. Dirt howled and I released the motor, which dropped into the dark green Florida Bay. Dirt spun to me, his face twitching at various spots. I backed away and he slammed his fist several times into the bridge.

For the next three hours Dirt sat slumped in the stern, staring overboard at the place where the motor had sunk. Each time I moved from the bow, he looked at me with such rage that I returned to my post and fought mosquitoes. Finally Bucky arrived, grinning like a frog.

“Fuck that motor,” he said to Dirt, “I've already got a new one on order. Be here in a week.”

“You fuck the motor,” Dirt said. “1 loved that thing.”

“Damn good motor, Dirt. Damn good. You hungry?”

“Rafe come back?”

“Got over his titty-fit in Miami and came running back to Slim.” Bucky looked at me. “They're Latin homos.”

When I didn't answer, an expression of chagrin passed rapidly across his face. “Don't mean to offend you if you're one,” he said.

“I'm not.”

“Don't matter either way. Slim's worthless but Rafe used to cook in Havana. Got to take the hen to keep the drake.”

After lunch, I learned that Flamingo had no beach. The land seemed neither to end nor the ocean begin, but at some imperceptible point one became the other in a fusion that shifted its boundary depending upon the tide. Mosquitoes hunted in great dark clouds. Tiny print on the can of repellent warned that the spray would corrode plastic, ruin varnish, and should not be ingested by humans. I limited its use to my clothes and sustained an average of a hundred and fifty bites per day. I soon developed something of an immunity.