by Lee Smith
“Let’s turn off the lights.” Suddenly Baby lunged across the front seat.
“Hey, whoa, what the hell are you doing?” Jesse asked as the dashboard went dark.
“Now, see? We didn’t even need them. Isn’t it beautiful?” Baby said softly.
It was. The road stretched out like a silver ribbon ahead of them, while the fields lay vast and soft on either side; they seemed to go on forever, gently rolling to the horizon. The moon was so bright that the telephone poles cast long shadows behind themselves. The old car glided down the highway like a ghost car, like a dream.
“Oh wow.” Noah pulled Harriet over to him and kissed her as if it were the most natural thing in the whole world, which at the moment it seemed to be, even to Harriet. Jesse turned the lights back on when he pulled off the road into a long rutted driveway that ended abruptly in the overgrown front yard of an old farmhouse. In the headlights, the farmhouse looked like it was in such bad shape that nobody could possibly even consider living there, but Jesse put on the brakes and turned off the key. “Home sweet home,” he said. Two other cars were already parked in the overgrown yard.
“I don’t know …” Harriet began.
“Hush. Come on,” said Baby.
Noah in the moonlight turned out to be taller than Harriet had expected. He wore an old blue work shirt, cutoff jeans, and work boots. He took her elbow to guide her up the rickety steps onto the porch. Wind chimes tinkled somewhere. “You live here?” Harriet asked.
“We’ve got it for the summer rent-free,” he said. “Only problem is, it doesn’t have water, so we have to carry it up from the well.” He gestured vaguely with one hand. “Oh yeah, the toilet’s over there, if you need to go. It’s the old-fashioned kind. An outhouse, I mean.” He switched on a bare hanging lightbulb in the front room which had a large table in the middle of it covered with leaflets and papers. A side door opened.
“Boys?” the most beautiful girl Harriet had ever seen stepped out blinking into the light. Her hair was like a black cloud down to her waist; she wore a man’s wrinkled white shirt. Her legs were dark and strong. “Oh, hello,” she said to them easily. “I’m LaGrande.” LaGrande was no older than they were. A man with a red beard materialized behind her, squinting so that you knew he needed his glasses.
“I’m Art Frazier,” he said. “It’s not much, but you’re welcome.” Everybody laughed. “Make yourselves at home.” Art Frazier and LaGrande went back inside their room. Then Harriet had realized that they were actually going to spend the night there, she and Baby, at that farmhouse out in the middle of nowhere, and that nobody even knew where they were; but in that instant she had also realized that she wanted to, that she wanted to be here more than anything. Noah’s hand felt like fire on the small of her back as he guided her up the stairs. “This is my room,” Noah said, lighting a candle. The room had no furniture at all except one caneback chair and some kind of wooden trunk stacked high with books and papers. Most of Noah’s stuff was piled in a corner, the rest of it strewn across the room. A bare mattress had been pushed right up to the floor-to-ceiling window, its shutter propped open by a pole. It had no screen.
“Come here,” Noah said.
As if she were sleepwalking, Harriet let him lead her over to the mattress.
“Look.” The dark woods stretched away down a slope at the back of the house to a little farm pond which shone like a lady’s oval hand mirror in the moonlight. Harriet sank down on the mattress just as a strange sound, almost like a woman’s cry, came from the dark trees. “My God! What’s that?”
“Just an owl,” Noah said softly. “We have a lot of owls out here. They’re hunting now. There’s a lot of squealing and thrashing around when they get something.” He put his arm around her, under the T-shirt, and pulled her close. He told her that he was a humanities major, that his mother was a law professor, that they were Quakers, that he had gone to the George School, that he had two little sisters named Daisy and Rose. He cupped her breast in his hand. She could feel his erection. He told her that he had an old yellow lab he adored named Gatsby, that he was reading The Magic Mountain. He unzipped her jeans and she started to cry.
Noah sat up on his elbow. “What’s the matter?” he asked.
“I can’t.” She was sobbing into the pillow, she felt so dumb. “Actually I haven’t ever … this is not …”
“It’s okay.” Noah stroked her hair. “It’s okay, don’t worry about it, it’s no big deal. Just forget it.” He lay back down and settled his arm around her waist again. “Listen to the owls. Go to sleep.”
When Harriet woke up, it was early morning and all the birds were singing and it was already hot. A thick blanket of yellow sunshine lay across Noah, curled on his side on the old stained mattress. He looked very young, slack-jawed in sleep. She nestled up to his back. She could smell him. She could smell herself. Chickens scratched in the yard outside and a cock was crowing someplace. This is my own life, Harriet said to herself. This is the real thing. Noah had two mosquito bites on one shoulder. She could count his ribs. “Hey.” She poked him gently. “Noah. Wake up. We’ve got to go. We’ve got to get back to the raft.”
Noah turned over to her, smiling. “Aw,” he said.
When they came downstairs, Art Frazier said “Good morning” and LaGrande gave them thick mugs of steaming coffee. “This is New Orleans coffee,” she said. “It has chicory in it.” Her plaited hair was wound up on top of her head. They drank the coffee sweet and black. It was wonderful coffee.
“You’d better go up and wake Jesse,” Art Frazier said. Noah took the stairs two at a time while LaGrande went out back to search for eggs. Harriet stood on the front porch looking off into the tangled woods while Noah pounded on a door upstairs. She heard Baby’s voice, then their clatter on the stairs. “Harriet?” Noah came out on the porch and stood close behind her with his arms around her waist. LaGrande came back around the side of the house with five fresh eggs cradled in the tail of her shirt. “Look, it’s an omelet,” she said. “You’d better stay for breakfast,” and she flashed her pearly grin. To Harriet she seemed the epitome of elegance and freedom.
“I wish I could,” Harriet said sincerely. The last thing she saw as they drove off was Art Frazier and LaGrande standing in the knee-high grass in front of the sagging porch with their arms wound tightly around each other’s waists, smiling straight into the sun as they waved good-bye. The trip back to the dock seemed short in the steamy morning. Jesse drove as close to the camp as he could, stopping at the edge of the revetment to let them out.
“What the hell—” The biggest trusty suddenly appeared beside the car on the driver’s side.
“Go. Go!” Baby cried, hitting the top of the car, which took off in reverse, spewing gravel.
“Son of a bitch,” the trusty said.
“Good morning.” Baby gave him her biggest smile.
He dropped his head and backed up, mumbling something they couldn’t hear. The old captain grinned at them, shaking his head, as they picked their way over the rocks toward the camp. Most of the girls were still asleep. Baby mixed up some instant oatmeal with hot water from the kettle on the fire but Harriet couldn’t eat a thing because the most awful thought had just occurred to her, she couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of it earlier. “Baby,” she said, grabbing her shirt. “Baby, what about Jeff?”
“Well, what about him?” Baby took a bite of her oatmeal out of the tin cup.
“But don’t you love him?”
“Sure I do,” Baby said. “But he’s not here. Anyway this doesn’t count. It doesn’t mean anything, believe me. Nothing happened anyway. Just forget about it.” She went to sit next to the captain. Already, she was his favorite girl on the raft.
HARRIET REMEMBERS WANTING Baby to be wrong. She had wanted that night to mean something, to mean everything, but as the days passed the meaning slipped away and it began to seem that maybe Baby was right after all, that Noah and the night in the woods had been mos
tly a dream, like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in fact, time out of mind, like Shakespeare.
So why is it more real to Harriet at this moment on the Belle of Natchez than her own real life, her exemplary life, all those years of taking care of Alice and teaching and mentoring and serving on committees and volunteering? Why does all that seem improbable, ephemeral, when it is, in fact, her life? Right now, Harriet feels more like the girl on the porch in Natchez than herself. She can almost taste that coffee with chicory in it. She takes off her nightgown and goes into the tiny bathroom. She’d better go ahead and wash her hair now, before she does any sightseeing, since she’s got—oh Lord!—a lunch date.
Mile 364.2
Natchez, Mississippi
Tuesday 5/11/99
1335 hours
OFTEN RUSSELL HURT wakes up into his life like it’s a strange house in another town, and he walks through the rooms and recognizes nothing, not the things of his life that are there nor the people who seem to know him. This has been happening for some time now. Yesterday, in Vicksburg, the tour guide told an anecdote that sums it up: There was a wounded Confederate officer—Russell has already forgotten his name—who was brought home from the war only to fall into a coma which lasted for weeks. His wife sat at his bedside during all this time, pressing gruel and water to his lips, fanning away flies. Though all in the household believed he could not recover, at length the officer opened his eyes to behold the haggard yet lovely countenance of his faithful wife. “Ah,” he said, sighing deeply, “My dear, pray tell me, where and who are we?”
Russell often feels this way, recognizing only the face of Catherine, his beautiful Catherine, whom he does not deserve. And sometimes failing to recognize even her, as today, at lunch, when suddenly everything she says gets under his skin, the way she and her friends are going on and on about the goddamn plantations. Russell fails to see the romance of it. To him, Natchez epitomizes the worst of the South, just as Catherine epitomizes the best of it. A monument to slavery, that’s what Natchez is.
Russell has read that right before the war, it was home to more millionaires than anyplace else in the country except New York, though it had only six thousand people. Thanks to slavery. With the invention of the cotton gin, the slave population in the South had increased from seven hundred thousand to four million. The biggest cotton crop in history was produced in 1861. Abraham Lincoln had been elected in 1860, amid rumors of war. (“Stop lecturing,” Catherine had whispered into his ear at lunch. “Why can’t you just let us enjoy ourselves? You’re not our teacher.”)
Russell threw down his checkered napkin and stood up at the table in the Pig Out Barbecue. “Hell, don’t mind me, girls,” he said. “I’m just nuts, Catherine will tell you that. To quote Woody Allen, I’ve got an inadequate denial mechanism, that’s all. Go on and enjoy your afternoon. I think I’ll head back to the boat. Catch up on some reading.” He blew them all a kiss from the screen door before stopping to think that this might embarrass Catherine, too. But she dimpled prettily and waved as the door slammed shut behind him. He shouldn’t have lectured them. He shouldn’t have eaten all that barbecue either. But he just couldn’t quit. He can never quit anything, that’s his problem.
Russell needs to get off this boat, to get back home and back on his schedule. Everything depends on his schedule. All this random eating and drinking is insane, it’s wrecking his digestion, too. Thank God for Tagamet. And yet he wants a drink, goddamn it, right now. All these bars are killing him. The more you drink, the more you want to drink, and Russell considers himself a carefully controlled alcoholic at the best of times, always has been, always will be. He never wants to tip the balance, to fall over into alcoholism, because then he’ll have to stop drinking, a thing he cannot imagine. It has been his drug of choice ever since he was a boy—thirteen or fourteen, getting beer from the pretty widow woman up the street.
Russell cannot imagine doing without women either but luckily he’s never had to. Women like him. This is because he likes them, which is immediately obvious to a woman. And sex is not all he likes. He likes to talk to them, too. Draw them out. Women like that. Most men—Russell has learned this from women—don’t really like them and don’t really want to talk to them. Especially in the South. Women don’t think enough of themselves either. They never think they look good, for instance. Even the most attractive women, it doesn’t matter. “My face is too fat,” they’ll say, “look at this,” pinching their own sweet cheeks. Or they think their butt sags or they have too much hair on their arms. It’s ridiculous. Now if Catherine would just grow the hair out under her arms, she’d be perfect. Russell has been trying to get her to do this for years. He can’t say why she won’t. Just thinking about it turns Russell on. Damn. He might as well have a drink, just one, to settle his nerves when he gets back to the Belle.
Russell walks down the hill as briskly as he can, considering his hard-on and the heat which is like a golden weight now on his head and the arthritis in his feet which is considerable. They wanted to operate on his feet at the Mayo Clinic, maybe he’ll let them sometime. But right now all he wants is a drink and a look at the Weather Channel, goddamn it! Enough is enough. A man can do without a phone. In fact, Russell has enjoyed being somewhat out of touch with the office. But a man can’t do without the Weather Channel.
Russell checks it out at least every couple of hours, more on the weekends when he’s home. At the office he’s got one of those tiny TVs in his top left desk drawer, which he can close if anybody comes in. At home he just clicks the thing over to the Weather Channel whenever a commercial comes on, which is all the goddamn time, it seems like. They have about three times as many commercials as they used to, and they’re louder than the programs. It drives him wild. All he ever watches besides the weather is ESPN and the Discovery Channel anyway. “Fuck!” he screams, clicking it around the dial. They’ve got a million channels now, too, and the shit they put on TV is just amazing. Here’s a big-haired lady evangelist, or maybe it’s a man in drag; there’s some surgeons performing an appendectomy; some babies starving in Ethiopia; there’s two huge wrestlers pretending to fight, now one of them is hitting the other with a table. A table! Shit!
“Why don’t you just turn it off?” asks Catherine, sweet reason personified.
But he never does. He can’t. Instead he clicks over to the weather, which calms him down immediately. He loves the music on the Weather Channel, for one thing. All that light jazz. Or maybe you call it fusion. It’s so upbeat, that bouncy vibraphone. He loves the pleasant weather girls in their nice little suits or sometimes a dress and jacket, he loves Dr. Stan Goodman, the lightning expert from NASA. He loves to know the temperature in Dallas, in Richmond and Seattle and Rome. He loves the Doppler radar system and the lake effect snows. His love for the thirty-six-hour forecast is exceeded only by his love for the extended forecast which covers five to seven days, now that’s what Russell calls a forecast! It’s encouraging to think that anything can be predicted five to seven days ahead, it gives him hope for the future, strength to carry on. The Weather Channel is what Russell has instead of prayer.
“It’s going up to eighty today,” he might call out to Catherine as she goes down the hall with a load of towels. Or, “Light rain predicted for afternoon.”
“It’s already raining,” Catherine called back once over her shoulder. “Why don’t you just look out the window instead of at that damn television all the time?”
But Russell merely shook his head, clicking. She doesn’t understand. And actually, Russell knows that the weather is random: weather is the basis, in fact, for chaos theory. Edward Lorenz’s work at MIT in the early 1960s provided a lot of insights into systems with nonlinear properties, such as the weather. Lorenz showed that as one parameter changes, others alter in a way that is not in direct proportion to this change. This means that the weather will never precisely repeat past patterns, and deep down, Russell knows this. The weather cannot be predicted.
Yet the “butterfly effect” seems true as well: the theory that one tiny disturbance in the air can create a major weather occurrence elsewhere at a later time, because of the interconnectedness of the atmosphere. Makes sense to Russell. He’s lost a couple of women and several clients this way, through tiny insignificant indiscretions that have come back against all odds to haunt him. And a lot of good things have happened to him, too, possibly as a result of some kind little thing he did for somebody else, years ago, if he did any. He thinks he did. He hopes he did. Like a little deposit in the karma bank, creating a positive butterfly effect. Makes more sense than believing in some big God guy up in the sky zapping people left and right just whenever He feels like it, whether they deserve it or not. If such a God does exist, then He’s a shit, and Russell doesn’t want to have anything to do with Him. But hell, if you think about this stuff too much, you’ll go crazy. Better to kick back, go with the flow, let that sweet jazz wash over you along with the five-day forecast …
“Good afternoon.” Russell nods to the purser as he crosses the gangplank onto the Belle. He takes the steps two at a time—Cabin Deck, Texas Deck, Promenade Deck. Then he heads for the stern, where the only TV he can remember seeing on this whole boat is located at the open-air Calliope Bar. Sure enough, there it is, tuned to baseball. Shit. Some old geezer in seersucker pants and a red bow tie sits slumped over the bar, talking to the bartender, a muscular young man who’s snapping towels and moving things around industriously despite the off hour and the heat. “Yes sir!” he says to Russell, startling him.
“Jack Black on the rocks,” Russell tells him. He climbs onto a stool. “Hello there,” he says to the old guy, clearly a drunk, beside him.
