The River Queen

by Mary Morris

  Jerry asks the lockmaster if he could tell us the nearest place for boat and automobile parts. “Just a sec,” the lockmaster says. “I’ll give it to you as you’re heading out.”

  On our way out the lockmaster attaches a slip of paper to a long, pointed stick. “What do you call that stick?” I ask him as we let go of our lines.

  “Oh, we call it a hand-me-down long stick.” And the boys have a good laugh over that one.

  Just below the lock and dam we spot the Bellevue gas dock, and Tom says, “I could use a shower.” I’m nodding in agreement. Three days seems like about my legal limit. “But if I have to,” Tom goes on, “I’ll jump right in. I’ve been christened in these waters all my life.”

  I’d prefer hot water—which is starting to become a bit of an obsession—not a cold, muddy river, but I don’t say so. A sign for “broasted” chicken catches our eyes and Tom and I both sigh. I don’t even know what “broasted” means, but I make a mental note to bring some back for lunch. We’re looking for a landing where there’s a marina and also an auto body shop since our engines are Chrysler and can be serviced by auto parts.

  We pull up to the funky metal Bellevue Courtesy Dock. It appears that this place is also a trailer park because there are perhaps a dozen or so trailers, most with some kind of dinghy attached. A man named George who seems to be the proprietor helps us tie up. “You looking for gas?” he asks.

  “Nope,” Jerry says. “We don’t need gas, but we’ve got engine trouble. What we need are parts.”

  George nods. “You’ll find a place in town. Well, let me know if I can help you out. Showers are three dollars apiece. You’re welcome to use my phone. Your cell phones aren’t going to work around here.”

  “Well, we appreciate that,” Jerry replies.

  After we’re tied up, George disappears back into his trailer park and Tom and Jerry go to work on our shopping list and I sneak a peek. Heet for gas tank (to suck up the water), spark plugs 2 sets of NGK, six bottles of carburetor cleaning additive, 3 fuel pumps, hoses and clamps, DIL filters, half quart of 50 Valvoline.

  I’m stuck at “3 fuel pumps.” How many fuel pumps does an engine need? Definitely not good. I take my sauce off the burner and put it in the fridge. I guess we won’t be dining for a while. “My treat for the showers,” I say. No one argues this time. In fact no one seems to be paying much attention to me at all. I assume I will have time for a very long hot shower. Several if I wish. We are in cell phone limbo (as we will be on much of our journey) and Jerry needs to call for a cab. He’s gazing into the engine as Tom starts ripping it apart. “I’ll go find George,” I offer.

  I head into the trailer park where people have set up their campers with signs that read YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE IRISH TO HAVE ATTITUDE. BUT IT HELPS; DANGER NO SWIMMING; or DON’T BOTHER ASKING. I’M IN CHARGE. There are statues of the Virgin, American flags flying. One trailer is landscaped entirely in plastic flowers and shrubs.

  As I’m looking for George, I run into a woman from Iowa whose license plate reads IOWA SHROOMS. Dee has got her camper set up on the water’s edge. She’s got her hummingbird feeders up and her barbecue. Dee has on three or four layers of pancake makeup and her hair is all fixed in one motionless swirl with spray. “Hey there,” Dee says. “You just taking a rest?”

  “Actually we have engine trouble.… I’m trying to find a phone, then I’m going to take a shower.”

  “Really. I didn’t know they had showers here.… How d’ya like that. Been here a month fishing and didn’t even know I could get a shower. Got everything I need in my camper though.” She points to her pull-out breakfast nook, her barbecue and hummingbird feeders where several hummingbirds are flitting along. “You with that houseboat?” Dee asks.

  “Yeah, I think we’ll be here for a while. My captain is trying to get a cab to take him into town so he can buy parts.”

  “Well,” Dee says, her pancake makeup cracking a little, “my husband can take you. He’ll be glad to.”

  I find Jerry, who is happy for the ride. He says he’ll be back soon. I pack up my towel and my cosmetic bag and I go to find the shower. It is located in a pump house off the side and despite the wooden floor and cobwebs and the chill in the air, it isn’t bad. The most important thing is that it has good water pressure. I take a very long hot shower, relishing the flow of water down my back. When I return, Tom goes up to take his. He drags his wheely suitcase with Samantha Jean tucked under his arm. “She needs a bath too.” He says he’ll throw her in the shower with him. I tell him I’ll watch the boat.

  Tom’s got the starboard engine lying in pieces along the stern and, as I gaze at them, I’m not optimistic about what’s ahead. Since I can’t make any calls, I have time on my hands. It’s a cold morning, almost raw, and the river is a monotonous shade of gray. It takes Tom what feels like forever to return from his shower. “I’m going for a walk,” I tell him.

  “Oh, take your time.” I hate it when they say this because I know he means we’ve got a long layover.

  “I’ll bring you back some of that chicken,” I say.

  I decide to go sightseeing in scenic Bellevue. To a New Yorker, Bellevue is our most famous insane asylum, but this place seems pretty stable to me. I leave the trailer park and head up the road where I see a Phillips 66 station and a sign that reads CAR WASH, GAS $2.64, LUBE JOB, LAUNDROMAT, OLD-FASHIONED ICE CREAM CONES, SPECIAL ON AMMO. Then I head to the Richmond Café for that broasted chicken.

  When I walk into the Richmond Café, the music video to “Mississippi Girl” is playing. I see two gay guys sitting, having lunch. This wouldn’t surprise me, of course, in New York, but it does in Bellevue, Iowa. In fact it looks as if the whole restaurant is filled with guys, right out of Brokeback Mountain, eating burgers and fries. At least I think they are gay. Then I realize that the two men I first spotted are just both wearing the same sleeveless T’s with the name of the cement company they work for across the front.

  All the men in the restaurant are in uniforms bearing names like TRUE VALUE, TACKY JACK’S SURE WAX, and PROFESSIONAL RESCUE INNOVATORS. All the women are wearing rhinestone crosses and taking their mothers to lunch. Everyone in the Richmond Café is either in a company uniform or wearing a rhinestone cross or both. And now I’m pretty sure no one is gay.

  “All Jacked Up” comes on the Country Music Channel as I order a hot meal. Chicken, a baked potato, a salad. Sitting there I am suddenly incredibly dizzy. The table, the booth are all moving. I feel as if the boat has entered me. I think it is a combination of the river and the drug cocktail I’m taking. I decide to try to ease off my pills.

  Walking around Bellevue, there are smiley faces, Jesus and Mary statues, and names on the door such as HELMUT and SCHRODER. Two men in brown shirts get out of a van and smile at me and say hello as if they have been recently returned by aliens.

  As I head back to the boat down a side street, a freight train passes me so closely that I can reach out and touch it. The engineer waves. I wave back. I find this river custom so quaint, yet so odd at the same time. I try to imagine waving at bus drivers, at subway conductors, at strangers on the street. But here we just wave and wave. On the river a fuel barge heads north. Nothing is moving south.

  I return up the beach with two bags of chicken, fries, sodas for the boys. I know we must be very delayed because Jerry has gone for a shower. Tom is groaning at his engine. “Come on, Baby. Come on, Girl.”

  The man who drove Jerry into town stands, rocking on his heels nearby, watching our progress. “Your husband looks like a good mechanic,” he says. I look at Tom in his Harley T-shirt, his belly spilling over his pants, as Samantha Jean, her tongue hanging out, peers down at him from the flybridge where he’s stowed her. “That’s not my husband,” I say.

  Tom grunts, tugging at engine parts, tossing some into the trash. I am completely skeptical and Jerry, who’s back and all cleaned up from his shower, is calmly sipping a beer. But somehow after four hours of throwing out da
maged parts and putting in new parts and greasing and lubricating and testing the fuel, it seems we are ready to roll. The chill has left the day and with waves and a push off from the dock we are moving again.

  It is good to feel the motion of the river beneath us, the boat chugging along. A huge flock of white pelicans does its strange interweaving dance. Bald eagles perch in the treetops. I had anticipated that the river would grow more industrial below Dubuque, that there would be more signs of man, on the river or along the banks, but it is remarkably devoid of human traces.

  I want to stop at Savanna, Illinois, but given the hours we’ve lost, we have to pass it. We won’t make a landing or a marina by dark if we stop anywhere now. We come to a railroad bridge and Jerry is worried about clearance. “Can we make this, Tommy?” he asks.

  “I couldn’t jump up and touch that, Sir,” Tom says.

  Tom is right. We sail smoothly beneath the bridge. “Rock ’n’ roll,” Jerry replies.

  The cloudy gray skies open up and it starts to pour. For several miles we are in a driving rain. Jerry calls ahead to the marina at Clinton to see if we can get slippage for the night, but no one answers the phone. “We’ll figure something out,” he says, shaking his head.

  We go by a fuel barge, the Penny Eckstein. One crewman, holding an umbrella with one hand, is barbecuing on a small Weber grill on deck. We come up on two islands that have their trees stripped bare. Thousands of cormorants roost in the naked branches. The trees are filled with nests the birds have made from the leaves and bark. We drift past the islands in silence, except for the chatter of the birds. It feels as if ghosts could dwell here.

  19

  MY FATHER died on May 14, just four months ago, which happens to be my birthday. Or at least he died at the very end of it. We had gone to the theater that night, Larry, Kate, and I, and were walking home along Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn. It was close to midnight and a woman was dragging a suitcase toward me. I stepped aside to let her pass and she kicked me in the gut, knocking me into the street. She screamed obscenities as her punch took my breath away.

  Larry and Kate helped me as I staggered home, shocked by the blow. When the phone rang an hour later with my brother calling to tell me that our father was dead, I already knew. I felt certain he breathed his last as that woman kicked me into the street. As I spoke to my brother, I could hear my mother shouting in the background. Not in sadness or grief. And she certainly was making no effort to console me. “Tell her there’s no funeral!” she yelled. “Tell her we aren’t doing anything at all!”

  I never spoke to my mother that night, but I know that she never shed a tear. She had reasons, I suppose, for being bitter. He had sold buildings he shouldn’t have sold. They hadn’t shared a bedroom in thirty years. He never took her anywhere. Once I asked her if it was his temper that had ruined the marriage for her and she said, “No, it was his indifference.”

  It had not been a loving union, to say the least, but, after all, it had lasted almost sixty years and produced two children. He was my father and, at the very least, she might have acknowledged my need to mourn him. That night Larry and I stayed up late, discussing what to do. When Kate got up, we told her the news, and she wrapped herself in a blanket and wept.

  Kate knew her own history. We had believed in full disclosure. She understood that my father had given me permission to have her and she had loved him in her own way. The last time she saw my father, she went with me to take him to the doctor. On the way back he tried to open the window, but accidentally opened the car door. As his frail body threatened to fly out, Kate caught his arm, pulling him back in. “Hey, Grandpa, where’re you going?”

  Since there would be no funeral, there was no reason to rush home. My nephews wouldn’t be arriving before the weekend. And Kate had her prom on Thursday and the preprom party was to be at our house. It would be difficult to cancel. In the end we decided to sit shiva in Brooklyn, then fly to the Midwest at the end of the week.

  For three days our house was filled with friends and food. A shiva candle burned. Flowers were everywhere. Neighbors dropped in. The rabbi stopped by to say Kaddish. Our house and our lives felt full. Then it was prom. When the three stretch Humvee limos pulled up in front of our house, children stopped playing in the streets. Our neighbors on all sides—the elderly Italians, the man who had just lost his wife, the neighbors we’d been arguing with over their construction—all came out to pay their respects. Everyone paused as fifty teenagers in bright satiny blue and red and lemon yellow dresses with stiletto heels and boys in tuxes, sporting white saddle shoes and aviator glasses, piled out of our house and into the limousines. There was palpable silence until an elderly neighbor blurted, “What kind of funeral are they having?”

  We flew to Milwaukee on Friday. Against my mother’s wishes, I had arranged for a short viewing and Kaddish before my father was to be cremated. When they wheeled him out, my mother poked his skin. “He’s cold and he’s in a cardboard box.”

  “That’s because he’s going to be cremated,” I told her.

  My mother sat uncomfortably through the Kaddish, then told her caregiver to take her home. Before she left, she went up to his body. “Good-bye, Sol,” she said. “It was fifty-nine good years. Good-bye. Now get me out of here.”

  Perhaps it was dementia. Or some mind-altering drugs she was on for pain in her back and knees. Perhaps it was just the years of being unhappy and dissatisfied. A talented woman with a degree in fashion design who sewed costumes for her children. “Smile,” she’d say to him at the end of the day. “It takes 359 muscles to frown, but only two to smile.”

  No tears were lost here. But I loved him. Perhaps because he believed in me. “Reach for the stars,” my father always told me. “You’ll never get there. But you gotta reach.” Neither my mother nor my brother wanted his ashes so I asked that they be sent to my house. I was out when the ashes arrived and the chiropractor next door signed for them instead.

  Joan Didion, delving into the loss of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, who died suddenly at the kitchen table, midsentence, writes that there are two kinds of grief. There is the uncomplicated kind when a person dies, is buried, and grieved. Then there is what the experts call complicated grief. This is brought on by an unresolved relationship, disagreement over final wishes, or delay of the funeral.

  Delay of the funeral. I think about this when I think of my father and his ashes, tucked behind my piano where I cannot bear to move or lift the box. I have not touched it since I placed it there. When I consider the options, I realize I do not know my father’s wishes. They were never made clear. Perhaps he too thought he’d never die.

  My brother wants to scatter the ashes at Sportsman’s golf course in western Illinois where Dad spent his Saturdays. My mother doesn’t care what happens to them, though downtown Chicago in front of the building he built at Oak and Michigan makes the most sense to her. I rather like having him with me in Brooklyn. I think for some reason, even behind a piano that isn’t played very often, he is happiest here.

  I have heard of an Amazon tribe that makes a soup out of the ashes of its elders. A year to the day after their death the tribe ingests this bitter broth. Briefly I consider this possibility, but it would be a lonely soup and I fear I’d be partaking of it alone.

  20

  IN THE early evening as we sail into Clinton, Iowa, the rain stops and the sky is a burst of violet and rose. The Mississippi Belle, a huge casino paddleboat, is moored in the harbor, its lights blazing and music blaring. At first I am disappointed at the thought of sleeping beside another casino, but Jerry heads beyond the casino toward the small marina. We drift into a quiet cove, passing houseboats with names like The Bottom Dollar and Blue Tonic, and come to a courtesy dock and tie up next to a boat named Sol, which, of course, in Spanish means “sun,” but it was also my father’s name.

  The dock is in an inlet, filled with mallards and egrets, and I am grateful to be here. As we tie up, once again I watch Tom and Jerr
y doing their knots. They make crazy loops, circling, tugging, winding in side-winding bends like the river, in and out of itself. “Jerry,” I say, “I want to learn how to do that.” He gives me one of his stares. “I want a rope lesson.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I want to learn to tie up the ropes.”

  Jerry nods, taking a sip from his beer mug. “Well, the first thing you need to know, Mary, is that as soon as a rope comes on a boat it’s a line.”

  I smile. “Thank you, Captain,” I mutter under my breath. “I’d like a line lesson. I want to learn how to tie up.”

  “Sure, we’ll teach you.” He raises a professorial finger in my face. “One thing at a time.”

  Tom shows me where to plug into the electricity on the dock and I drag the cable and plug it in. The sky turns scarlet as a bouquet of roses and I sit on the dock, feeding stale bread, of which we seem to have a good amount, to the ducks. I’ve done this since I was a girl. On every family vacation I’d wait at the kitchen door of restaurants and take stale rolls and bread crusts to the duck ponds. I have spent entire vacations rubbing hard loaves of bread against the trunks of trees that lean across the water. My father used to complain that we’d gone to Idaho to do what I could do a few feet from home.

  I’ve got about a dozen ducks squawking at my feet when Jerry sits down beside me. As I’m tossing bread, he’s snapping pictures. I look at his hand as he clicks. “Jerry,” I say, “can I ask you something?”

  “Sure,” he says.

  “How’d your lose your fingers?”

  “What fingers?” He laughs. “Oh, those.” He holds up his right hand with its finger stubs. “Well, I lost the tops of two when I was a boy. The third one I lost when I was working on a houseboat a few years ago.”

  “When you were a boy?”

  “Yeah.” He’s staring out at the river now. “You know, my dad was a fireman and he had a workshop in the basement. He made furniture and stuff. Anyway he was at work one day and I went down and used his saw.”