The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  Kath stops (she’d spoken none of this aloud), her left hand upon her breasts, her right upon her belly. She had been going to say Out of the Lower Bay into the Upper, out of springtime into summer; it has just now occurred to her that that also means out of Gemini into . . . Peter! she says, stricken, and his happy face flies. These children are Cancers!

  That consideration carries us all the way up to Love Point, famous haunt of Chessie, the local sea monster, five nautical miles and a full hour later. Comforts Peter Sure, we’d hoped for Gemini, as we seem to be having more than one. But we hadn’t really expected Gemini, had we, our median EDC being right where C. B Silver called it. Look here, hon, comforts Peter: Astrology, for pity’s sake, it’s just fun and games; and the, you know, precession of the equinoxes? has fucked up the zodiac since ancient times. Plus Cancer is the crab, right, not the tumor. What could be more appropriate? We’ll name them Uca Pugnax and Uca Pugilator.

  Says sort-of-comforted Kath That’s who they feel like, all right. Ucae.

  Two species of fiddler crab, reader, hereabouts. Keep an eye out for Chessie now as we round Love Point.

  We duly do, and as always see nothing untoward. The tide does its usual queer stuff to us in that neighborhood, whose geography urges the current in several directions at once. Our plan has become to pop into Queenstown Creek, six or seven miles off, just around the Chester’s great first bend, for late lunch and a swim, then to sail on upriver for a while if the good breeze holds.

  No sea monster in this chapter. What, then? We’re running downwind now, wing and wing, centerboard up and our biggest headsail whiskered out to windward; Story tucks up her skirts and scoots nicely down the warming air. But the better we move on this long leg, the less apparent wind we have to cool us. Off come our tops; we look forward to gybing, about four miles down the road, onto a cooler broad reach around the river’s U-turn and over to Queenstown Creek. Katherine steers; Wing plays with Wing; Peter tersely tells our log about Carla B Silver, Marian and Simon and Short Jon Silver, also Whatsisname, Lascar the Transylvanian there. I dig these names, he says to Kath. If I were writing a story with these guys on the payroll, I’d call the Rumanian one Lascar Woiwod, which I think means “werewolf” in Rumanian or Slovenian. Maybe Lascar Woiwod kissed that Carol Kane person on the neck while he was handling her produce, and that’s what tripped her circuit breakers.

  But K’s shading her eyes and looking over there toward Kent Island Narrows, at the bottom of the big U, where a tricky little channel like the drain in a sink-trap connects the Chester with the next river-system south. She says guess what she sees. Says Peter, not turning around, You see Chessie the Shoal-Draft Sea Monster, of course. Nope. Uh, you see Sindbad the Sailor with Don Quixote on his back. One more guess. Hum: You see Act Two of Sex Education colon Play.

  You got it.

  Come on. He looks where she points and sees nothing particular at first except, in the near distance off Story’s port bow, the radar-reflecting black buoy which happens to be our gybing mark and, in the farther distance, the red-and-black entrance buoy to Kent Island Narrows. Kath says Over by the red-and-black one, and he sees what she means: an orange float that looks to be moving with the wind and tide instead of bobbing in place like a crab- or eel-pot buoy. Yeah, well, he says, a float got loose, is all. Let’s gybe.

  Not till you check with the binocs. So we fetch up the 7 x 50s, and Peter says Yeah, well there, it’s orange, all right, and it’s loose, all right. And it’s probably a crab float, but it really could be another one of those distress-flare canisters. He hands over the binoculars. Boyoboy; girlogirl: Let’s go home like Irma says and have our little fiddlers and go back to Baltimore and back to work.

  Katherine wonders whether God is a postmodernist or a CIA spook. We gybe per plan, but detour over toward that red-and-black entrance buoy and the crooked line of day beacons leading through the narrows. Both tide and wind are behind us here, but down there—for geographical reasons that we’re used to—the tide will run powerfully against us, and that’s fortunate; otherwise this monkeying around could fetch us into shoal water. It’s an Alert-and-Locate canister, all right, just like the one we fished out of Knapps Narrows on Day 1. Are we ready for this? P takes the crabnet, K the tiller; we miss the thing on first pass, but get enough feel for its drift and ours to luff up on second try and lay it right against our leeward beam.

  Your mother is a hotshot sailor, Pete tells Pugnax and Pugilator; wait’ll you see. He dips the thing up, un-nets it, gives it a shake. Doesn’t sound like flares and such in there, but it might be. So come on, says Kate: Open it already.

  The idea that what we have here could be Act Two of that queer playscript, which it obviously is, is perfectly preposterous. The statistical improbability! The craziness of anyone’s publishing his/her manuscripts by floating them off in casks, in installments, yet. Says Kate I love it; open, open.

  Pete sits Turk-fashion on the cabin top, in no hurry, the canister in the space between his thighs. Maybe a genie will pop out et cetera. Do we know how to deal with genies?

  Says Katherine Leave ‘em to me. Maybe Scheherazade’ll pop out and tell you stories enough to last you till the world ends. Her face flickers. How many would it take?

  One, says Peter, if it’s long enough. He’s busy sailing now; in her condition, Kate can’t winch the sheets hard without straining something. Queenstown Creek’s just over yonder; let’s go with this low-grade suspense till we’re parked.

  The big Chester’s sprinkled with other sailboats, workboats, sportfishing craft; half a dozen more weekend sailors are threading up through the Narrows from Eastern Bay, the Miles, the Wye, and as many are threading down that way for the night. But the creek, when we enter it, is as we expected all but empty: too early for most folks to park. Just inside the entrance is an elderly black schooner from Toronto, heading home from down south, we guess: long, shapely overhangs, handsome teak decks, a fine transom cumbered by the ungainly contraption of windvane self-steering. Its crew sunbathe in bikinis, read under awnings, wave hello. Down by the funky public landing, which the cruising guide misrecommends as the creek’s best anchorage, we spy a mast or two more. But in the upper end, snug and roomy, nobody’s home; we beat up there, slowly, our breeze baffled by the walls of trees on either side, and drop our light anchor at the mouth of Salthouse Cove, our favorite spot in this neck of the woods. One Canada goose and seven white swans paddle in the shallow cove. Like that Toronto schooner, Peter remarks, they’re in no hurry to get back home. Katherine observes that their ratio is the same as in the folktale, no? Open the canister?

  NOPE.

  The post-noon is warm, the sky lovely, the creekwater clean and net-tleless. We’re far enough off from our human neighbors not to bother with swimsuits, and those wild waterfowl won’t mind. Let Act Two wait. Pete hangs the ladder, peels off his pants, and monitors his wife’s painstaking descent—naked but for her black beret—before following her over the transom. Do not dive into these opaque waters, reader, until you’ve poked and paddled about the area first. Under that mild surface might just lie a sunken something not noted on the chart but waiting to fracture your reckless skull; or the tide might have swung you on your rode from the twelve-foot spot you anchored in to a three-foot shoal near shore.

  Peter pops under to sound it while Katherine floats above; we’re comfortably half again over his head. Silky on our skins, delicious: Queenstown Creek. Does our man have tears or tidewater in his eyes?

  Both. Because when it’s sweet, life is so sweet, and it is so miserable for so many so most of the time. A third of us, is it, more or less starving? Half? And more than that large fraction brutalized one way or another, exploited, harassed to the end of their Hobbesian days. And then the corruption, brethren; the pollution, poverty, crime, disease; the betrayal, deception, torture, derangement, and what else. Well, mere melancholy, which poisons even the rare ripe fruits of comfort and serenity. Pain pain pain!
Plus, oh, the twin-edged blade of consciousness, which lets us know, as those eight waterfowl presumably do not, how privileged is an interlude like this—our floating lunch-break, our pregnant idle voyage—and thus at once keens its pleasure all but unbearably and makes us weep for the sorrows of, you know, the outraged world. Upon which the curtain bids to ring down anyhow.

  Luckier than the reader, Kate gets told all this by one shoulder-touch at Story’s boarding ladder, up which presently we haul our dripping selves. Have we lost our appetite for lunch, she wonders, or are we all the hungrier?

  Both. She parks her beret on the new canister, it having come from the old, and we let the thing sit there, honest to God, smack in the middle of Story’s cockpit sole, like a bright orange family Thermos, like a sign reading IGNORE THIS SIGN, while we drip dry and relotion, make and eat lunch in high June sunshine tempered still with lingerings of spring. Presently Peter sighs, says

  OPEN THE DAMN THING,

  and we do.

  Tongue-tisking reader, what do you expect we expect? You’re reading The Tidewater Tales: A Novel; we’re telling our stories, which are our story, which we’re living and have lived from moment to moment, creek to creek. No more than you do we really expect a genie, say, to roar like a smoke-flare out of this canister, or Act Two of SEX EDUCATION: Play, or any other astonishing, improbable thing.

  So we merely hum and chuckle when out of the unscrewed canister Kate pulls nothing more nor less remarkable than a bundle of bright-colored rags. Next installment of the Emperor’s Old Clothes? Well, not a bundle of rags, we now see: a bundle bundled in a rag. And not really a rag, right? It’s pretty good material: a nylon or rayon or maybe even silk material in a swirly, slightly faded blue-brown print: a paisley kerchief or bandanna for Katherine, to go with what Peter now claims as his beret. God knows that is unlikely coincidence enough, whatever’s in the bundle, which Kath a touch gingerly now unknots, and voilà: the rolled-up, rubber-banded sheaf of ruled 8½ x 11 three-holers in its transparent plastic food-storage bag, and we understand that as with Captain Donald Quicksoat, there is no hurry at all; let’s go sailing; it is too sweet an afternoon to waste. We could throw the thing back overboard, we half believe; take a turn or two up the Chester before parking again for the night, and it will be there waiting for us when we’re ready to settle down and read it—at happy hour, say?

  Humming uneasily, hum dee hum hum, we actually do put it back in the canister, the Baggie still Baggie-tied, and rescrew the orange lid upon our curiosity, and slip into our swimsuits and make sail and weigh anchor and tack out of the ungenerous channel of Queenstown Creek, out into the river, rich in sails now, the weekenders piling in from everywhere and the local fleet piling out. Story heels over with a sigh from tack to tack; Act Two of SEX EDUCATION: Play rolls around our feet till Peter pops it into a locker beside its twin lest we take a tumble. Kath’s got her new scarf on already, not bad-looking at all (Pete’s stowed the beret in a coaming box because it won’t sit tight on his hair in a breeze). We gee-whiz as far upriver as Piney Point astarboard and Ringgold Point aport, and a little past; we consider Cacaway Island, up ahead somewhere in big Langford Creek, but decide not to park there, not on a Saturday; maybe farther up in one of Langford’s forks or over in the Corsica, just up the road off to starboard, where now we can see the nearer of the two Georgian-style mansions of the Corsica Neck embassy compound.

  Pete suddenly says Jesus: Paisley! Telepathic Katherine groans I’m gybing and pulls the helm hard up, cutting dangerously across the bow of a biggish sloop behind us. Its helmsman whips his wheel over to clear us as he’s obliged to, but the maneuver collapses their monstrous Technicolored spinnaker, which the crew must scramble forward to rescue while the skipper gives us the finger and shouts strong language our way. Kate murmurs Sorry there.

  Paisley/paisley/Paisley: We clap our collective figurative brow. Mixing Operation BONAPARTE with Swimmers and Floaters and Paisleys and Gay May in the merry month of June, we’re not certain what we’ve got, but we’re certainly ready for the second act. We could park for a spell right where we are or pop into the nearest creek—there’s always one ready to hand hereabouts—but Story’s got her way on now, on almost as nice a reach down as the one up, and because so many careless sailors go aground at its deceptively straightforward entrance, Queenstown Creek is seldom crowded even on weekends. Back down the broad Chester, therefore, we broad-reach; we hang a left at the nun, another at the last blue heron to port in ankle-deep water at the entrance-channel’s inner edge. Hello again, Toronto. We sail and scull through the flukey air inside, back up to Salthouse, where the seven swans and single goose have reserved our parking place, and though it’s only late afternoon, we put the heavy hook down for the night and assure the Nopoint Pointers that we’re an easy half-hour’s ambulance-ride from the Easton hospital.

  It is warm, even sweatsy, even under the awning in the nearly-no-breeze in here, and that water looks inviting, all right, and we’ll dunk into it presently again for sure, but not before fishing out and having at that canister, opening that Baggie, stripping the rubber bands off that roll of loose-leaf paper, and (K first this time, passing on each manuscript page to P as she reads it) reading

  ACT II: DOWNSTREAM.

  Act Two, Downstream, she says. Not even a title page. If we had found this first, we wouldn’t even know what it was Act Two of. Hey, you were right.

  Come on, says Peter. Read it out loud.

  Nontheatrical Katherine won’t do dialogue except in folktales and children’s stories, but she reads us the opening stage direction. What she meant by Peter was right was that after reading Act One back in Dun Cove, he’d predicted that in Act Two the plot would be thickened by the two ovas’ encountering sperm, and under Act Two’s title (we still can’t recall ever having seen chapterlike titles on the acts and scenes of television plays) she reads

  Scene 1: The Swimmer.

  Says P What else is new? K reads

  (Somewhat farther downstream, somewhile later. The Mainstream is wide here, the current steady but smooth, the ‘space cavernous but less dark.)

  This is inside somebody’s uterus? she asks, laying a hand on Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Below the Confluence, Peter reminds us. May and June had heard the first sounds of those Swimmer guys in the distance, coming their way, but they shoved off anyhow, onward and downward. Read.

  (Occasional background sound of them the swimmers, ever more frequent as the scene progresses. From off-camera come the squeals and laughter of the two FLOATERS, still calling “Onward! Downward!” as they work downstream, JUNE swirls into sight first, somewhat dazed but exhilarated, and pauses in a shallow eddy below a large boulder.)

  Complains Peter She’s always pausing in a damn eddy. Kath says Try doing dialogue when you’re shooting rapids. That’s all I’m reading out loud.

  Boulders in a womb, Peter murmurs, but holds his peace while Katherine reads on to herself.

  JUNE (Calls back upstream): Here’s a place to rest, May! Whew!

  (MAY swirls into the eddy with a flourish, equally exhilarated; her envelope is in tatters.)

  Paisley/paisley/Paisley, Katherine thinks, fingering her scarf and wistfully recalling white-water adventures with May Jump in less pregnant days.

  MAY: Look: It’s practically off me.

  JUNE: Mine too. That waterfall! (She strikes a pose to display a revealing rent in her own envelope, MAY whistles like one of THEM.)

  MAY: Wasn’t that second whirlpool a bitch!

  (As they speak, they repair their envelopes, assisting each other in the places difficult for the wearer to reach.)

  KATHERINE: Uh-oh.

  PETER: Don’t start uh-ohing. Hand it over.

  JUNE: “Enjoy each stage, girls.” (They laugh.) You’re a terrific Floater, May!

  Here, says Katherine, passing him page one. That Enjoy Each Stage stuff sure does sound like Florence Halsey. It’s all too spooky.

/>   MAY: You are. That last stretch of white water . . .

  JUNE: I majored in White Water.

  KATHERINE: Yay! White Water!

  JUNE: But there isn’t supposed to be any below the Confluence.

  MAY: What isn’t supposed to be would fill a book.

  JUNE (Grins): Maybe we’ll write one.

  PETER (When he reads this far): A postmodernist self-reflexive lesbian menstrual comedy.

  MAY: Why not? What’s a book? Oh, right: book.

  JUNE: We seem to know more things down here than we did upstream.

  MAY (Nods): More things that we don’t know.

  JUNE: For instance—Could you fix me back here?—I feel pretty sure now that I’m part of a . . . woman and not part of a horse or a hen. Don’t you?

  MAY (Shrugs; she is enjoying her job.): Coach Lefkowith told us that a woman is nothing but a Floater’s way of making another Floater. How do you know you’re not a man?

  JUNE: Ms. R said we’re not anything until we merge.

  MAY: Lefkowith said we’re not anything afterward.

  JUNE: So what do we know for sure?

  MAY: I don’t know.

  JUNE: Too bad we didn’t know about that second whirpool, anyhow. Wasn’t it there before?

  MAY: I wasn’t there before. The waterfall was as far as I got, last time down. (She grins.) From here on, it’s virgin territory.

  JUNE (Grins too): For both of us. (She takes MAY’s arm, impressed.) You really swam all the way back to the Confluence from that waterfall! I can appreciate that better now, May.

  Me, says Peter, I smell a dramaturgical rat. Shoot me that next page. Kate swears him to silence and does.

  MAY (Gratefully): I couldn’t do it again. And it was certainly better coming down with you than going it alone. It was almost fun.