Читать книгу In the House of Wilderness - Charles Dodd White - Страница 14

6

STRATTON LEFT early for Knoxville. He got up in the warm summer dark, fed the cat, and stood on the porch with his coffee. There were many songbirds out there in the concealment of the tree line; their voices seemed to testify to the belief that they could dissuade nighttime air. In a while it seemed to be the case, the old parchment gray of the hour filtering in.

When the light was full he went back to where he’d boxed so many of Liza’s pictures. It felt wrong to keep them like that, even given what the real estate agent had said. He hung many where they had been before and the rest in the back bedroom. If he were to have his way, they would soon disappear, but it was better to have them where he could see them for now. Better to deal honestly with what they were.

I-40 was flanked with occasional crosses to mark the highway dead. Semis pressed from behind, headlights in the rearview mirror like threats. Things slowed as he came into Knox County, the glut of commuter traffic rising up as suddenly as something sprung from the ground. There were stalled vehicles on the shoulder, yellow roadside assistance trucks flashing code lights. At a halt, he quick-timed the intervals of traffic, plunged his foot on the gas so hard that his heart bobbed up to his ears and then the gridlock fell away.

There was a spot on Volunteer Boulevard on the university campus; he fed the machine with all the spare change he had and tried to remember how to get around. In a quarter of an hour he found himself standing in the waiting room of the office for the art and photography program. The woman behind the front desk was on the telephone. He took a seat and waited.

“Can I help you, sir,” she said a few minutes later in a tone that suggested the very prospect grieved her.

“Yes, ma’am. I was hoping to talk to John Easterday. I wanted to see him about some photography he might be interested in.”

“Let me check his schedule.”

She made a face that was less than encouraging before turning to consult her computer monitor.

“It looks like he’s on campus early this afternoon and has an office hour. From one to two. It’s an open hour so he should be available to walk-ins. I suppose you might need to know where his office is?”

Stratton said that he would. Without a word she scrawled an abbreviated title and a number on a pink Post-it and stuck it to the desk counter. He peeled it off as carefully as he would a bandage, thanked her, and left.

He wandered down to the banks of the Tennessee and walked the greenway for a while. He had not been to the city in well over a year, and it was always a pleasure to come and spend a little time here where the river flowed under the old iron railway spans. It provided the perfect opportunity to empty himself, to walk beside something of magnitude.

An old spaniel with a gray muzzle popped up a few feet in front of him and wolfed. His owner, a sleek black man in a battered fedora, told him to hush as he flicked his fishing rod toward the water and the reel sang.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “he don’t eat white meat.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

The man spoke a few words barely audible and the dog relaxed, his tongue rolling brainlessly from his mouth. Stratton patted him on the head and the tongue went to work. When the dog was done Stratton wiped the back of his hand along his trouser seam.

“I should have brought my rod.”

“You should have. There’s plenty to catch in there.”

Stratton took a seat and watched the man fish, cast after cast, with the elegantly slow retrieval, the rubber lure fluttering in the brown water. Patience and commitment to pattern made into its most essential shape.

“If you don’t mind me saying. You look like somebody that ain’t in the right place,” the man said.

“There’s a fair chance,” he said, and despite his desire to say something more to the man, he felt awkward and prohibited. He remembered the ugliness of his father about Black men and what he would say when he would see them sitting beside some bridge or overpass fishing. Street bait niggers, he had called them. Even as a boy, it struck Stratton’s ears with its low violence, its idle hate. But he’d never been able to tell his father his thoughts and now they passed through him with a haste to be gone. He said his farewell and went on.

On farther up the landing he passed a few people out on a midmorning stroll. College boys and girls running in close file, made of little more than lovely muscle and tans. He marveled at the fact that the young women stimulated only the lightest whisper of lust. Was he that far into oblivion that he could sign the receipt on his own broken libido? He sat on a bench and watched the river for the small fishing canoes working in close along the banks, their pilots scruff of face, their paddles tilted like medieval lances. They reminded him of McCarthy’s Suttree, of the man who forsook everything promised for everything abject; he suspected real genius in a man like that, though he would be hard-pressed to say why he thought so.

He ate lunch at a riverside restaurant called Calhoun’s. The waitress seated him in a glass room overlooking the water. His table was cut hard down the middle by a stripe of sunlight from overhead, but he liked the view and the relative quiet. He ordered iced tea and a hamburger and watched a long snaking barge crawl with the current, its burden under black tarpaulins. On the opposite bank big cranes were unmanned but appeared to be staged for demolition of the old hospital. The barge came even and blocked his view with its slow dream of gradual movement, setting all surrounding things into their relative contexts of time.

He finished his lunch and paid his bill, went back up toward campus to tour the McClung Museum, derelict this time of the week. It was cool and dark inside, the exhibits maintained with a kind of clinically imposed silence. He started on the bottom floor, walked past the displays of different primate ancestors, rigidly patient in their artificial skeletons. Next door he found the Civil War display with its sabers and bullet-torn tunics, its soft maps of temporary conquest, proof that progress across the ages had been altogether dubious. He liked the display of indigenous Tennessee gems the best, preferring their resistance to becoming anything more than what they were—beautiful pieces of self-sufficient geometry. On the top floor he found the pottery of Egyptians and scale models of their sacred cities, but it was the exhibit of the Mayans that he liked best and where he lingered. He read of their classical period, saw the stone art and the elaborate calendar.

He wondered what would be made of this time he lived in. What would historians write of this life built around objects glowing with the magic of electric power? A world made up of billions of small parts that most men and women walked through without the faintest idea of how they actually worked. What kind of exhibits could be arranged for men like that?

He realized that he’d lost track of things and was late to meet with Easterday. He hurried out through the front doors and past the sculpture of dinosaur bones, bumping into a security guard and speaking a quick apology. When he arrived at the office, he found the man already gathering his things to leave.

“Excuse me, Dr. Easterday, but we’ve met once before,” Stratton began. “At an exhibit of my wife’s several years ago.”

Easterday crammed a sheaf of handwritten papers into his leather briefcase and snugged it by a pair of belted straps. He had not bothered to glance up.

“And who was your wife?” he asked, stroked the slight whiskers of his chin distractedly as he turned to shut off his computer monitor.

“Liza Bryant.”

Easterday’s eyes rose briefly, made a weak effort at smiling.

“Yes, I believe I remember. It was in Atlanta, wasn’t it?”

“Savannah, actually.”

“Yes, that’s right,” he said, caught in the awkwardness of how to go on. “I know it means very little, but my sincere condolences. I didn’t know your wife but through a few professional contacts, but I was upset to hear of her passing. Her work was important. How can I help you?”

“I wanted to talk to you about her pictures. About donating them.”

“Donating them?”

“Yes, for a collection. For the university to house.”

Easterday seemed to weigh this a moment.

“I was just on my way out for the day, Mr. Bryant, but why don’t you let me buy you a drink so we can discuss your offer.”

A quarter of an hour later they were sitting at the bar of the Bistro at the Bijou Theater drinking whiskey highballs. Stratton had parked his car in an overnight garage and walked down, followed Easterday’s directions. They had the place to themselves this time of the afternoon. Gay Street was all busted concrete and cyclone fencing from some work on the sewer system, so the tourists avoided coming this far down the avenue. Nothing but the dark solitude of the leather stools and the reliable attention of the man behind the bar, the full clash of sun on the facade, while quietness enclosed them.

“You’re making a mistake,” Easterday began. “I hope you realize that. It’s foolish to just give these pictures to us. They’re worth a great deal more than we can afford. Now, I’m not about to turn my nose up at a windfall, but I do want you to explain it to me. Otherwise, my conscience might develop a bit of a rash.”

Stratton felt odd to find himself in defense of his intended charity. It wasn’t what he had expected to have to do.

“It’s about her legacy,” he said finally. “If you were to pin me down about it. I want this part of Liza to have a life of its own. I think it deserves that.”

Easterday absorbed this over a philosophical swallow of his whiskey.

“Yes, well. That certainly sounds good, even if it is only about half of what is going on. Listen. I’ll be willing to take you up on this, get the materials housed here and get you at least an honorarium that saves us from looking like a bunch of cheap criminal bastards. Given one condition. Sleep on it. If this still sounds viable tomorrow morning then I’ll get the wheels turning.”

Stratton could see no reason to not honor Easterday’s request. They agreed over a second round and did not talk of it again.

He made reservations for a room at the downtown Marriott and took a cab over, promised Easterday he would see him the following morning. Though still early, he was exhausted by what he’d accomplished, and he drew a bath for a soak in the deep tub. He turned the water as hot as his skin could endure and eased into it. The heat was like being born into something and it released all that he had carried into the day. He would be glad to be relieved of Liza’s pictures. Like selling the house, it was what was needed if he was to find out what it meant to live on his own. Some men could live as ghosts or votaries, hang their fortunes around the throats of the dead, call up the pieties of grief. But Stratton had come close enough to that kind of sacrifice while Liza was still alive. He wouldn’t shoulder it in her death. People who survived shouldn’t have to suffer the curse of common virtue.

HE LEFT for home early, but even so when he got there he saw his professor friend from the college, Josh Callum, sitting in his truck at the end of the driveway smoking a cigar. In the pickup bed his red kayak was stuck in amid a jumble of camping gear. Out here on one of his rescue missions, no doubt.

“Was on the verge of getting the bloodhounds after you,” Josh told him. “You heard the water report?”

“No, I’ve been busy. Some of us are grownups even.”

“Doesn’t excuse negligence, bud. They got a bona fide deluge over in Carolina. Plus, this weekend coming up is Deliverance weekend. The boys just thought we’d hit it a couple of days early. Get the hell out of Dodge, make a run that was worthwhile instead of scraping bottom the whole way. I told them I’d kidnap you if you refused, so they’d think a lot less of my manhood if I turned up by myself.”

Stratton toed the truck’s front tire, thought if there was any way to say that he couldn’t do it, though he knew he had to come out from time to time. Otherwise, people started to notice, and he didn’t want to have to face that.

“Yeah, okay. Let me feed and water the cat and get my boat.”

“You take care of the cat. I’ll grab your boat. How is that old tabby bastard doing, anyhow?”

“About as well as all of us.”

“That bad? Damn.”

For a sane man it was two and a half hours to the river, but Josh slashed a good twenty minutes off that. After they went up the I-40 gorge and passed over the state line they cut through the slim western finger of North Carolina and took Highway 107 through Cullowhee and made the winding shot up into the higher mountains, slowed through the wealthy second homes of Cashiers and then descended the South Carolina grade with its panorama and occasional general store. They were at the Chattooga North Fork put-in by noon and were ready with all their gear stowed in the kayaks and down on the river half an hour after that. They’d beaten their paddling partners, Cliff and James, who had a few domestic chores to tidy up before they’d left Clemson. They checked everything to make sure they could duck into the water at a moment’s notice before they cracked a PBR tallboy and passed it between them.

“Camp beer,” Josh said.

“Damn right.”

“Not for reasons of hipsterdom, mind you.”

“Hell no.”

“Just economic practicality.”

Of all of the river trips Stratton had made, the Chattooga three-day run was his favorite. Josh always referred to it as the Deliverance trip because many of that film’s climactic scenes had been shot along the river and while running the rapids it was easy to recognize some of those landmarks. Stratton had read Dickey’s novel for the first time after his inaugural trip but was disappointed when he saw that the writer had used a fictional name for the river. Since then he had always preferred the movie.

They’d finished the beer can and crushed it when Cliff and James pulled up in Cliff’s battered Cherokee. Though a scholar of Irish literature who had published monographs about Flann O’Brien and Frank O’Connor, Cliff liked to pretend a kind of rustic machismo that included his choice of automobile. Every facet of the vehicle carried knocks and concavities from aggressive off-roading, stripes of pine pitch where he’d blazed trails untried. Cliff said it was the natural product of living a stripped-down existence, close to the bone. James had said it was because Cliff would forget what made him a man without it.

“You tenderfoots ready to take your chances on this goddamn beauty of a river?” Cliff called down from the parking area.

“I think we might be convinced to hazard it,” Josh answered.

They exchanged embraces, stood talking for a few minutes until they walked the paddles, supplies, and kayaks down to the water. With their gear stowed and battened, they lowered themselves into their boats, closed the skirts and pushed down the soft grassy decline. They slipped into the water with the strange grace of smoke.

The river was slow this far up the fork, the wooded banks a constriction of half-tumbled pine pinned back from the waterway by large hanging loops of overgrown poison ivy and a barrier of mixed scrub. Stratton picked up a line behind Cliff, just a few yards off James’s right bow, and paddled softly, getting used to the newly quiet world this close to the weightlessness beneath him. He felt settled by the compliance of water, as if it needed him there to run true.

“Makes you almost feel human again, huh?”

This from James, spoken in his companionably soft voice. Unlike Cliff, he preferred to speak when he had something to say. Stratton had known him for a dozen years and had only a superficial knowledge of his life away from the river, but that didn’t seem to matter. What they knew of each other out here held greater consequence.

Within the first half hour, they scooted over three downed trees, crossed the timber’s wet backs and pivoted through the shallow runs, rocky entrances that required a technical handling of the boats. They made the main branch of the river within two hours, the sun running long fluttering shadows as they moved on toward late afternoon.

As they rounded a deep curve, two herons dropped from a close branch and flapped upstream, passed overhead. Their thin legs were folded up and as they flew their bodies seemed to lope despite their grace. Without being able to name precisely why, Stratton watched them with the sense that it was important he remember every detail he could.

They reached the island where they intended to camp not long after the river fell to late afternoon shadow. There were perhaps two hours of daylight left, but it was a good time to settle and build a cook fire. Stratton dragged his boat up, shucked his life vest, and dug out a length of loose chainsaw with corded grips at each end. He and Cliff crossed the island and forded a brief feather of whitewater before climbing up the mucky shore of the main bank.

“We’re in Georgia now, son,” Cliff said. “You and sister-wife are full legal in this country.”

Cliff was ever testifying to the frequency of incest in Georgia. Stratton suspected that it owed much to his loyalty to the Clemson football program. His mouth kept running until they found a downed white pine straddling a broken hemlock. The end had been sawed off smooth and it didn’t appear anyone had tried it since this same trip the year before.

“Let’s hit this bad boy a few licks,” he said.

Stratton pulled the loose chainsaw to its full length, handed the other end over the log where Cliff took it and they began to cut together, kept tension as they pulled. As they worked the chain tightened in the cut and sawdust snowed into a small mound of powder that collected at their feet. Within five minutes the heavy timber, big around as a man’s waist, cracked and thumped to the ground. They set back three feet farther and did the same thing, working like men born to this life and nothing else. A few minutes later that length too was cut and ready to be hauled back to camp.

Twenty minutes later the mosquitoes got bad. Having had enough, they teamed up on each log, carried them balanced on their shoulders, made four trips while Josh and James trued up the pile of small and medium deadfall they’d gathered.

When the fire was burning well they all found sturdy branches and opened their Buck and Case knives, whittled cooking sticks, and stuck their steaks on. They seared the meat quickly before putting it between hand-torn hunks of bread. They ate and passed two plastic pint bottles of George Dickel whiskey.

“To that great man of the Volunteer State,” Josh intoned as he raised one of the bottles. “Mister George Goddamn Dickel.”

“Hear, hear.”

“A poor man’s solace, I’m afraid, gentlemen,” Cliff countered, though he did not refuse the bottle when it was passed his way. “You Tennesseans would do better to look to your white liquor and leave the manufacture of brown spirits to your northern neighbors, despite their late lamentable status as a border state.”

Stratton could tell that Cliff had been taking early samples of whatever personal ration of alcohol he’d brought along. When he was into his drink he had the habit of adopting the speech patterns of a wounded Confederate cavalry officer tolerating the ignorance of his benighted lessers. One of his favorite subjects of debate was bourbon.

“Now, Pappy Van Winkle is the beverage of a true Southern gentlemen,” he drawled. “Why, I picked up a bottle the other day for the modest sum of four hundred dollars.”

“That right?” Josh said. “I’d not give a damn for your Pappy Van Winkle up against this Dickel. You want to know why? Because Dickel is here and Pappy ain’t.”

“One doesn’t bring liquor of that caliber amongst heathens like yourselves,” Cliff concluded.

The talked passed around like that a while, half-joking and companionable. James told of a visit he’d made over into Clayton, Georgia, where he’d met the banjo-strumming boy from Deliverance. He was middle-aged now, of course, and worked as a greeter at Wal-Mart. James said that he was pleasant and gave his autograph freely. Stratton thought how strange it must be to be that man, forever famous as something that was as much a part of imagination as fact.

As the whiskey gradually disappeared Josh and Cliff went off to their tents. Stratton sat up with James while the fire thinned. They heard a screech owl and Stratton whistled to it a few times to draw it closer but the bird remained out in the dark somewhere. He tried to remember the last time he’d called one up within sight but it had been too long and his desire to recall doing so may have been a lie to cover the truth of what may never have happened. He wasn’t sure that he’d ever seen a screech owl in the wild at all. Perhaps what he remembered was from some documentary he’d watched as he was falling asleep in front of the TV, National Geographic or Planet Earth. There was no way to be certain. He whistled again.

THE SUN was up under a screen of gray that saddled the valley. From it a fine mist fell. The men all sat in a small circle around Cliff’s camp stove as he heated water for coffee, and they listened to the light rain tap the tarpaulin stretched from the tree branches overhead. Stratton had succumbed to a mere tolerance of the morning, the night without sleep on his shoulders like something that had him in its grasp. He took his canteen cup of coffee and carried down his dry bag of compressed gear to the kayak on the island’s mud shore. Once it was all aboard he sat on the bow and lowered his face to the steam.

They met the braided water and shuttled through the runs. The sunlight flattened everything into a perpetually moving image that drew them toward the best entrances and sometimes the worst. The bottoms of their boats ground over submerged ledges and narrow traps until they rocked free and paddled into stronger water.

It was all as wild as it was supposed to be.

Stratton tailed James, watched his entries closely and tried to match them as best he could. The river was not as high as he had expected and the rapids were toothy with stones normally rounded by the smooth carve of whitewater. Still, they ran hard and fast and true, met the high spray and paddled hard into the laughing riffles as they glided out from beneath the tall figures of white pines and the crows at early roost under a sky that pended storm.

Shortly after noon they entered The Narrows, turned into the currents that pushed them clear of the dangerously undercut boulders to the left and dipped into a pool of calm water halfway down the rapid. Cliff beached first on the sand and stone beach and everyone came in close beside him in the notch, pulled their boats halfway out of the water before they turned out from their dry bags what they would eat and drink. Stratton tipped up his Nalgene bottle of water, felt like he could empty all of it into him as easy as if it were air.

They climbed up to an overhang and sat there overlooking the river while they sheltered from the passing shower, dipped their fingers into peeled-back tins of sardines and tuna with crackers, legs dusty with pale Gatorade powder. Stratton unbuckled his life vest and set his helmet on a flat ledge of stone beside him, felt the breeze touch him with a slight trembling. He sat and ate, though he did not taste anything. He was thinking only of how little difference there must be between him and a man passing through this place a thousand years before, how that man, like him, would have stared into this rushing water with awe and respect.

“You hanging in there, bud?” Josh asked, offered a nip from his leather flask.

“Yeah, I’m good. Boat’s good. Not much else to ask, is there?”

“No, I don’t really guess there is. You know I’m not just asking about the boat though, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I know.”

“All right. I won’t beat you over the head with it then.”

“I appreciate that.”

Stratton tipped back the flask, felt the burn pass his lips and spread out in his stomach like it meant to colonize him. In the end, it was enough to make him talk.

“I’ve been wanting to ask you something, Josh, if you don’t mind.”

“Hell, you know I don’t.”

“I wanted to know what you think about why we try to keep ourselves away from suffering. We all know it’s coming, don’t we? I mean, there’s really no possibility of avoiding it, but that doesn’t stop someone from trying. And we tell ourselves that we are the only ones who could have possibly hurt from something to the extent we do because it wouldn’t make sense otherwise. Because when it happens it feels so unnatural to us, so specific, that we can’t make sense that everyone has the same thing to deal with.”

“You want to know if I think universal damnation is something to get in a tizzy over? Sure, of course it is. That’s what we do best as people. We bleed. Look, bud, I know what you’ve got on you is something I’ll never understand. That doesn’t mean that you aren’t still yourself inside whatever it is you’re going through. You still exist and you are the only one that will ever get to live inside your skin. You get to build that church of meaning wherever you decide.”

Stratton considered telling Josh that was the coldest kind of comfort but didn’t see any gain in mocking his friend, especially as this friend was doing the best he knew with a question that was unanswerable. He would have done as well to ask the rock beneath him, perhaps better.

They paddled that afternoon, made camp on a broad flat stretch of Georgia shore with many hours of daylight left, hung from a rope swing left there by teenagers. Stratton watched as his friends took turns sprinting and flinging themselves from the bank. They flew like trapeze artists and screamed like happy children. He watched it all with eyes he wished belonged to another.