The Boy in His Winter Page 10

  I SAT IN THE COMPANION’S SEAT, next to James while he led the boat out from the bayou into the Gulf. Ahead, its water had turned golden like a molten ore poured down from the foundry of the sun. It slipped and rolled in shining disks, and white ibis, gulls, and albatross, come to rest or hunt, turned golden, too, like idols. Much later, in a travelogue, I would see a holy man walk down a stone ghat into the Ganges and sink to his chest into such a gold. The water, at this late-afternoon hour off the Mississippi coast, might have hidden in its depths the ancient water gods: Repun Kamui, Lir, Mazu, Vedenemo, Galene, Chalchiuhtlicue, Kanaloa, Idliragijenget, Mizuchi, Tangaroa, Nammu, and Rán, who, in her nets, collected drowned men for the Norse. Of course, I knew nothing about the heathen deities—my religious education having been limited to what I saw enacted in Sunday school Nativity and Easter plays. Miss Watson would tempt me with cookies and doughnuts to spruce up and bruise my backside against a hard pew. But while James steered northeasterly for Gulfport, I felt what must have been reverence. Maybe an intimation from my own timeless days reached me while I sat on the bridge and stared at the transfigured water. Or I may have sensed the presence of gods with whom—unknown to me—I’d shared a mythic past.

  You’re right, it sounds far-fetched, even for me. Why don’t we put it this way: Childhood had made me susceptible to evening’s fugitive beauty. Those sensations of awesomeness—nettlesome and unfamiliar—must have scared me; I broke my spellbound stare and turned to James, like a boy throwing stones at a stained-glass window to prove himself a roughneck and a clod. No boy wants to be thought an angel!

  “What’s that sticking in your ears?” I asked, pointing to a Y-shaped wire disappearing into James’s blue-denim shirt pocket. It was, I tell you, a diversion, nothing else: I didn’t want to appear flummoxed in front of James.

  “My iPod,” he said, his hand beating time on the polished ball of the throttle. “It’s music, man! Where’ve you been hiding, Mr. Albert? On Mars?”

  If only he knew. I leaned toward him and heard a faint and distant singing, reminiscent of a wasp caught in a jar of marmalade. For all I knew of iPods, the sound really might have originated on Mars.

  “That’s ‘Slave Driver’ by my righteous man Bob Marley. Listen up, Mr. Albert,” James said while he pushed one of the “buds” in my ear.

  I listened without enthusiasm. I did not dislike what I heard; I was indifferent. My heart had moved too strongly toward a recognition of—how do I say it without sounding impossibly vain and pretentious? I guess I can’t, and the reader, if I have one yet, must take me as I am: thoughtful. Call me a thoughtful man who wishes to make himself understood in matters closest to his soul and is in love with words.

  So, my heart had transported me, while I watched the golden Gulf water slide and churn up ingots, toward a recognition of transcendence and eternity. Even a boy born on a mudflat can sense, sometimes, the weight of things and see, for a moment, what the moment holds. I had drifted into familiar waters—not that I’d been on the Gulf before. But a timeless feeling stirred me, produced by the light and a sweetness carried on a seaward breeze across Chandeleur Sound. Good Lord, what would Tom Sawyer say to hear such hogwash, such a load of bull? Don’t misunderstand me: I did not yearn for my past life on the river. I was done with it. But in years to come, I’d grow nostalgic for it nonetheless.

  The sun had nearly vanished behind me. The shadows on the bridge inched toward the east. I couldn’t see the brothers, but their shadows sparred against the cockpit sole. I shivered with an unnamable fear while, one by one, the nameless stars appeared. For the first time, I wondered about my life; I’d been careless of it before. But with care comes fear, such as when we take something fragile and newly fledged in our hands. I looked at mine, barely visible by the compass light, now that night was falling. With a finger, I traced the boat’s name incised onto a brass plate on the instrument dash: Psyched. I didn’t know what the word meant. But in Hannibal, I’d known psychics and mediums. I told you Marie Laveau could resurrect frogs and see the future in a crystal ball. (Miss Watson knew I’d come to a bad end, without benefit of any devil’s instrument.) There was also Madame Ambrogio, to whom the spirits dictated prophecies concerning Armageddon and what your aunt in Topeka would be sending you at Christmas. During a tent show, Tom and I marveled at a Russian mystic in a pink-striped vest who could poach an egg with the heat of his gaze and scuttle spoons across the table by the power of suggestion. My favorite psychic was an ancient black man who could foretell the year of your death by the number of worm holes on an apple. After he was finished, he’d eat it for good measure. Jim used to throw chicken bones, but I was not convinced he had the knack of it. Christian teachings must have corrupted his finer animal instincts.

  Was I gifted? I had “feelings” rare in a man, but not so uncommon in a child, especially one whose childhood spanned much of the nineteenth century and the entire twentieth. But I couldn’t levitate, divine the future, dowse for water, invoke the devil (except my own familiars), or cause spirits to appear, regardless of how they would appear to me. And rarely did I communicate by occult means with either the quick or the dead. Many years ago, I attended a séance. After a half hour’s ungracious silence while we waited, in a gloom fragrant with lavender and dust, for a spirit to rap, I received a message—in dots and dashes—from Tom Sawyer. Having obtained a practical knowledge of Morse code in the Hannibal telegraph office, where smuggled whiskey and cigars were given to select boys in return for sweeping the floor and emptying the cuspidors, I interpreted the uncanny transmission in this way: You will find buried treasure at such and such latitude and longitude, both of which I intend to keep secret to safeguard a certain public official’s prized flower beds from destruction. I did, in fact, unearth a mob of forget-me-nots and found nothing more valuable than a pair of old waders. Tom was ever a trickster.

  Night had fallen like a scythe, as it will in subtropical latitudes. Our running lights shone on the black water, and James was following the channel markers into the harbor at Gulfport. We’d left Port Eads and crossed Chandeleur Sound to the Mississippi coast in six hours at a speed less variable than that of the raft, which might ply a river mile in minutes or in what seemed to Jim and me an age, according to aspects of time impossible to plot. I’ve tried to recollect how celestial bodies behaved during my childhood—the charmed one where my atoms were not obliged by gravity to move in ever-tightening orbits around the pivot, death. I can’t recall what pictures the stars made against the sky, if the moon wore a lopsided grin during its phases, if meteors streamed from out of the farthest corners of space, or if the sun, in its day, arrived in green-and-rose bunting and, later, set in rags of red and gold. Tom would have sneered at such purple, but my imagination had fed on the Sir Walter Scott novels he read to me. The night sky may be a perfect emptiness outside of time or, on the other hand, a crowding light; the day, a brilliance whose source is God or a supreme fission. (Or are the terrible secrets hidden in a dusk?)

  That night, standing on the bridge with James, the stars told complicated stories in a language all their own. Had I kept dogwatch through the late hours, I might’ve seen the grinning moon sail across the darkness, showers of burning ice, and perhaps a golden planet advancing in a slow processional. James slowed the boat and brought her fenders lightly against the dock. Edgar and Edmund leaped from their respective places on the fore and aft decks and tied up to a pair of rusty bollards.

  “How many knots did she make?” I asked James after he had turned the motors off. They grumbled a few seconds before giving up the ghost—a black and choking stench of diesel smoke.

  “Eighteen, nineteen,” he said.

  “Can she do more?”

  Boys love speed and recklessness. Long before this, I’d stretched out on top of a Hannibal & St. Joseph railroad car—the first in the territory—while the locomotive clicked down shining rails at eighteen miles per hour, raining on me sparks and cinders from the firebox. I tell you
I was thrilled to death to move at such a speed! On the river, sometimes its banks would blur as the material world disappeared. I can’t even guess how fast we traveled. Lishkovitz may have calculated time’s escape velocity, but not in regard to a boy and a runaway slave on a raft.

  “She’ll cruise at twenty-three knots,” James said. Had Psyched been a racehorse, he would have stroked her flank. “Wide open, she’ll do twenty-seven or -eight, depending. We fitted her with bladder tanks to carry extra fuel, which make her heavy. But she’s got long sea legs! We won’t need to refuel as often.”

  I wanted to know why we hadn’t gone faster. I didn’t believe in saving—money, energy, or myself for a future consummation. I spent what came my way as quickly as it arrived, squandered resources so as not to miss an opportunity. Mark Twain never understood the extent of my ambition. I was no ordinary Huckleberry!

  “Best not to attract attention,” James replied, laying a finger on his lips. “We’ve a long trip ahead of us.”

  Did I know what was hidden on board?

  Not then, I didn’t. And later on, when I knew, would it have made a difference to me? Would I have piped up in feeble protest or jumped ship and headed—where? Where had I to go? No, I would not have fussed. I confused natural probity with the lessons of the Sunday school. I did much out of spite for the self-righteous hypocrites who’d breathed their stale breaths down my neck. I wouldn’t understand virtue until much later, when I was in love, which is also variable and absurd. Besides, I thought, what is the crime of smuggling compared to stealing a man from his rightful owner?

  JAMES AND I WENT INTO TOWN to buy groceries. Edgar walked the marina docks in search of an adventure, which I surmised—by his clean shirt, freshly shaved face, and the bottled scent he’d drizzled on his palms and patted on his cheeks and neck—involved a woman. He was a good-looking rogue with an easy, indulgent smile of well-aligned white teeth. Edmund, however, was not one of those villains with a pleasing shape. He was unshaven and untended. His teeth were tobacco-stained, his fingers yellowed. His wardrobe consisted mostly of gray T-shirts and dirty dungarees. He was a misanthrope without a philosophy to justify his mistrust and envy of others. I hated him. Neither brother, I later realized, was much good; but Edmund was a dangerous good-for-nothing.

  James?

  Even now, I can’t bring myself to judge him harshly, though he was a shady character whose choices had been motivated by self-interest. You could see it in the showy gold-clad tooth. But unlike Edmund, James was not vicious. I say this, knowing that he’d killed a man in Port-au-Spain and had to flee the island to escape the law and the vengeance of the dead man’s relations. He had been a young man then—he was in his fifties when I knew him—but still, he’d given way to fury and searched another’s innards with a knife. He may have had good reason. I never asked, and he did not know I knew. It was Edgar who told me because, I think, he was jealous of my admiration for the other man.

  No, no, no! It was nothing like that! A man can be wounded by an unrequited love, whether for a woman, another man, a boy, or a dog. To think otherwise is not to have lived with open eyes and ears and mind. I liked James; I may even have loved him. Except for his name and race, he was nothing like my old Jim. But I couldn’t help feeling that, in some way, in some measure, the one was dissolved in the other. Jim was sugar stirred into James, sweetening him. It makes not a particle of sense, I know. Answer this: Do you, my scribe and sounding board, believe anything I’ve said?

  No?

  Sometimes, one must tell an outlandish story because the truth is too fantastic to be believed. What I believe is this: To read a book is not to experience life, but words—only them. But to say “only” is to underestimate them. Words in their sentences are a cosmography like arithmetic or the study of the stars and planets. I would not let you think that all these words—how many are there?

  So many! I never guessed there’d be so many words, in rows and ranks, like soldiers in a forced march! Like automatons—cyborgs, they’re called now—impressed into the service of a mind. But that is something I choose not to believe: I mean that all these many words I’ve bundled into the world are a logical result of consciousness and an autocratic will. I insist on caprice as a necessary countermeasure to slavery. Otherwise, my own dictatorial mind must take—unknown to me—its instructions from a mastermind. And I insist, as well, that this story tells a truth.

  The Gulfport Convenience Store was an inglorious relation to the grocery in Hannibal where I had filched apples and walnuts. James seemed unaware of the poverty of its stock. Could it be that even Trinidad, which I had associated in my childish fancy with a natural largesse enriched by the swag of buccaneers, was, in 2005, also a fallen paradise? In many ways, the twenty-first century has been a disappointment to me. We go faster; we go nowhere. We live longer, only to be sick and disillusioned at our end. There’s a chicken in every pot, with no thought to the suffering of the chicken. We consider ourselves lucky to have discovered, at last, ice-free routes for luxury cruises to an Arctic without snow or once indigenous life. We’ve applied the commercial notion of wholesale to death, which was sufficiently ample during the middle years of the nineteenth century. We have more geniuses than ever before, and the fruit of our genius is spoiled by the black spore of greed, murder, and catastrophe.

  Would I have traveled back in time to pastoral America? (Notice, I do not say innocent.) No, life flows only in one direction, which is forward, and—moment by moment—becomes enamored of itself.

  James filled the shopping cart with bread, cans of tomato soup, spaghetti, and tuna fish (with the nearby waters swimming with yellowfin, swordfish, grouper, tarpon, weakfish, drum, anchovies, sea trout, jacks, pompano, king mackerel, porgies, snook, red snapper, flounder, herring, grunts, and God knows what else or for how much longer), bottles of water and soda (cream, orange, root and birch beers), frozen hamburger, bacon, sausage, and boxes of doughnuts (jelly, cream, chocolate, and apple). He bought cigarettes in the brands favored by Edgar and by Edmund and, for himself, twisted cheroots soaked in bourbon.

  “Anything you’d like, Mr. Albert?”

  He always called me Mr. Albert. God rest his bones.

  I put a corncob pipe and a foil pouch of cherry-flavored tobacco in the cart. Then I went to the rest room, though I did not need to rest, and splashed my own golden water onto a soggy mess of cigarette ends and wads of spent chewing gum.

  James was waiting outside the store for me. Together, we walked home, admiring the soft night. I had discovered, while riding across the sound with him, that celestial observation was no longer necessary to navigation. The boat was equipped with GPS: Our positions and course were whispered to us by satellite. At the time, it was only another marvel to wonder at; but I’ve wondered lately what we may have lost by this device: a thread of light connecting our eyes to the sky. But I have—doubtless, you’ll have noticed—a sentimental strain to my character. I used to fight it by pretending to be harder than I am. In years to come, I’d be a salesman and a sort of journalist; and both require aggressiveness to succeed.

  “I bought you this,” said James, taking from his jacket a paperback book. Pausing under a streetlight, I read its title: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. “You remind me of the boy in the story. Both of you floated down the Mississippi and smoked corncobs.”

  What else could I do except to thank him for his kindness?

  Did I read it?

  No, but I pretended to, for his sake. It was kind of him. In fact, it was my first gift. Pap had never in his short, dissolute life given me anything but lickin’s. Miss Watson and the Widow Douglas gave me useless things at Christmas, like scratchy mufflers, girlish mittens, and grammar school primers. James was the first to give me a present for no reason other than human kindness. Human. It’s a word you don’t often hear, except by way of extenuation for a minor transgression. I stole my neighbor’s ripe tomatoes from the vine, the hubcaps from his car, the wife from his bed—I
’m only human! Otherwise, you don’t hear or see the word used much. Perhaps it reminds us that we are, like all other living things, a species.

  Have I ever read Twain’s book?

  Recently, since coming here. I decided, at my age, it couldn’t do me any harm. Twain took some liberties—I’ll say that much.

  James and I carried the groceries on board. Edmund was asleep on the sofa, a Mexican sombrero covering his face. A nearly empty bottle of tequila, lime wedges, and a hill of salt lay on the table. James took a pinch of salt and tossed it over his shoulder. How many times had I seen Jim do the same?

  “Let him sleep it off,” he said. “You can sleep in his stateroom. I’ll take the mate’s cabin. Get a good night’s rest. Tomorrow, we fish.” He smiled at me and went below.

  I guessed that Edgar had found company for the night. I felt like a smoke before bed and went outside and into the cockpit, climbed onto the bridge, packed my pipe with tobacco, and, drawing deeply on the stem, dragged sweet smoke into lungs not yet besmirched by tar or time. (Cankers of the flesh and spirit are unknown on rafts such as I had ridden.) The stars did not appear so hectic behind a haze of tobacco smoke, which calmed me and them both. We could be forgiven our weariness after so long an age spent in unceasing motion. I let the stars be, and looked toward Gulfport, whose lights were fewer now that night had deepened.

  I hadn’t known many people and couldn’t help wondering at them—the human beings who lived on this edge of the continent, in a border town between elements. I wondered at the kind of life that went on inside its houses. Would I recognize it? I felt alien. And James, asleep in the narrow bunk, Edmund, inside some good or evil dream, and even Edgar, at rest in somebody’s arms (it little mattered whose)—if they were to wake in the darkness, would they feel alien, too? We may as well come from Mars as from Earth, which we insult like rude and careless strangers.