On the River Styx: And Other Stories

by Peter Matthiessen

  “Well, he di’nt exactly say that, Lawyer, cause he don’t exactly know, but after last night we can sure as hell agree that Johnny knows something about somethin. I’m gonna get that son’bitch in here in a minute, and he’s gonna tell ol’ Speck and me just what he done with your little tape toy.”

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” Burkett said.

  Dickie, coming with his coffee, backed up into the kitchen. He seemed astonished by the anger in Burkett’s face.

  “Goddamnit, you go get that tape deck.”

  “Johnny took it! Took it home dat night! Got scairt, dass all, he was bringin it back, den Miz Alice hollers out and Judge Jim caught’m!” Seeing Burkett’s doubt, he went on furiously, “Tellin you God’s truth! Maybe Johnny slung it into de bush someplace! Doan know where he got it!”

  “Well, go find out! He’s over in the shed!” He shook Dickie’s arm, slopping the coffee. “Suppose he tells that man in there who gave it to him in the first place?” Dickie just stared at him. “Christ, what does it matter now who took it? You’re both in trouble!”

  Aware of a furious impulse to cuff Dickie, to yell at him in exasperation—Stupid damn nigger!—Burkett was suddenly all out of breath. He went outside and sat down heavily on the stoop. There would be no victory here, whatever happened. Dickie came slowly to the screen door.

  “Just get it, that’s all! I’ll say I found it!” Once again the guide was hissing his denials through the sagging screen, but the hissing faltered. Burkett could hear the rusty doorknob turning, forth and back and forth again.

  “Better trust me,” he said. “I’m the best you’ve got.” Still the man stood there. Then he snaked through the door and down the steps and around the building, his hands spread-fingered in conflicting agonies.

  Burkett walked up the street a little way, trying to calm himself, as the sun rose to the black tops of the eastern trees. The palm fronds shivered hard as the wind freshened. In the early light, the water of the creek was thick bronze silver, like a heavy oil.

  Alice came running. He turned his back to her in sign that she must not interfere and returned to the kitchen door, where a paper bag was sitting on the steps.

  She looked exhausted. “Dickie took that bag just now from beneath our porch!” Her voice rang loudly in the stillness, and his nerves gave way. He snapped at her, “Just stay out of the way!” Her face was crumbling as he mounted the steps, but he could not deal with it, not now.

  Poking his head into the kitchen, he said to Dickie, “How much do I owe you? For guiding, I mean?”

  “You’s gots to see Judge Jim ’bout dat.”

  He took a deep breath and knocked. “Judge Jim?” He entered the back room. “I’m sorry for all the trouble,” he began, holding out the small thing in both hands, like an offering.

  “Oh Godawmighty!” Whidden said, half-rising from his chair, wiping spat coffee from his chin with the back of his hand. “What in hell is goin on around this place!”

  When Burkett produced his traveler’s checks and began to sign them, Whidden sank back slowly, both hands flat down on his desk, trying to control himself. “You ain’t so smart as you think you are,” he muttered finally, counting the checks. “This business ain’t finished by a long shot.”

  He raised his eyes. “What you waitin on, Lawyer? You people get the hell out of my town.”

  Passing the kitchen, Burkett thanked Dickie, offering his hand. The black man backed away. In a stifled voice he said, “You leavin here. Leavin us stuck wit it.”

  Burkett thought, I’m stuck with it, too.

  To the east, the royal palms on the old street were black against the growing sky. In front of their cabin, Alice was waiting in the car, her pale face watching out for him over her shoulder. He had hardly started across the yard when Whidden’s voice bawled, “You, goddamnit, Dickie, get on in here!”

  “Keep movin,” Speck called quietly, when Burkett faltered.

  1985

  LUMUMBA LIVES

  1

  HE COMES BY TRAIN out of the wilderness of cities, he has come from abroad this very day. At mid-life he has returned to a hometown where he knows no one.

  The train tugs softly, slides away, no iron jolt and bang as in his childhood, no buck and yank of couplings, only a gathering clickety-click away along the glinting track, away along the river woods, the dull shine of the water, north and away toward the great bend in the Hudson.

  Looking north, he thinks, The river has lost color. The track is empty, the soft late summer sunshine fills the bend, the day is isolate.

  HE IS THE ONE PASSENGER left on the platform, exposed to the bare windows of Arcadia. He might be the one survivor of a cataclysm, emerging into the flat sun of the river street at the foot of this steep decrepit town fetched up against the railroad tracks on the east slope of the Hudson River Valley. What he hasn’t remembered in the years he has been gone is the hard bad colors of its houses, the dirtied brick and fire bruises of the abandoned factory, the unbeloved dogs, the emptiness.

  On this railroad street, a solitary figure with a suitcase might attract attention. To show that his business is forthright, he crosses the old cobbles quickly to the salesmen’s hotel at the bottom of the downhill slide of human habitation. The dependent saloon has a boarded-up side door marked “Ladies Entrance,” and the lobby reminds him, not agreeably, of looted colonial hotels in the new Africa that he supposes he will never see again.

  THE STRANGER’S SOFT VOICE and quiet suit, his discreet manner, excite the suspicion of the clerk, who puts down a mop to shuffle behind the desk and slap out a registration form. This dog-eared old man spies on the name as it is being written. “We got a park here by that name,” he says.

  The man shakes his head as if shaking off the question. Asked where he’s from, he says he has lived abroad. The foreign service. Africa.

  “Africa,” the clerk says, licking a forefinger and flicking the sports pages of a New York daily. “You’ll feel right at home, then.” He reads a while as if anticipating protest. “Goddam Afros overflowing right out of the city. Come up this way from Yonkers, come up at night along the river.”

  Nodding at his own words, the clerk looks up. “You have a wife?”

  “I saw them,” the stranger says. At Spuyten Duyvil, where the tracks emerged from the East River and turned north up the Hudson, black men had watched his train from the track sidings. “They were fishing,” he says.

  The stranger’s fingertips lie flat upon the counter as if he meant to spring into the air. He is a well-made man of early middle age and good appearance, controlled and quiet in his movements. Dry blond hair is combed across a sun-scarred bald spot.

  “Fishing,” the clerk says, shaking his head. “I guess you learned to like ’em over there.”

  The man says nothing. He has shallow and excited eyes. He awaits his key.

  Irritable and jittery under that gaze, the clerk picks out a key with yellowed fingers. “How many nights?”

  The man shrugs. Asked if he wishes to see the room, he shrugs again. He will see it soon enough. When he produces a thick roll of bills to pay the cash deposit in advance, the old man inspects the bills, lip curled, checking the stranger’s face at the same time. Still holding the cash as if in evidence, he leans over the desk to glare at the large old-fashioned leather suitcase.

  The stranger says, “I’ll take it up. It’s heavy.”

  “I’ll bet,” says the clerk, shaking his head over the weight he had almost been asked to hump up the steep stair.

  On the floor above, the man listens a moment, wondering briefly why he sets people on edge even before trouble occurs. Their eyes reflect the distemper he is feeling.

  He opens, closes, bolts the transomed door.

  THE ROOM IS PENITENTIAL, it is high-ceilinged and skinny, with defunct fire pipes, no pictures, a cold-water sink, a scrawny radiator, a ruined mirror on the wall. The water-marked walls are the color of blue milk. The bedside table is so
small that there is no room for a lamp. The Gideon Bible sits in the chipped washbasin. A rococo ceiling fixture overhead, a heavy dark armoire, an iron bed with a stained spread of slick green nylon.

  The pieces stand in stiff relation, like spare mourners at a funeral whom no one is concerned to introduce.

  His reflected face in the pocked mirror is unforgiving.

  The room has no telephone, and there will be no visitors. He has no contacts in this place, which is as it should be. Checking carefully for surveillance devices, he realizes the precaution is absurd, desists, feels incomplete, finishes anyway.

  Big lonesome autumn flies buzz on the windowsill. The high bare window overlooks the street, the empty railroad station, the river with its sour burden of industrial filth carried down from bleak ruined upstate valleys. Across the river the dark cliffs of the Palisades wall off the sky.

  HIS MOTHER had not felt well enough to see him off, nor had his father driven him down to the station. The Assistant Secretary for African Affairs had wished to walk his English setter, and had walked his son while he was at it.

  We want you to gain the Prime Minister’s confidence. He may trust you simply because you are my son.

  Unfortunately the more … boyish?… elements in our government want another sort of prime minister entirely. They are sure to find some brutal flunky who, for a price, will protect our business interests.

  The Assistant Secretary had not waited for the train.

  Make the most of this opportunity, young man.

  By which he meant, You have this chance to redeem yourself, thanks to my influence.

  The gardener had brought the leather suitcase. From the empty platform they watched his father stride away. At the north end of the street, the tall straight figure passed through the iron gate into the park.

  The gardener cried, So it’s off to Africa ye are! And what will ye be findin there, I’m askin?

  TURNING FROM the window, he removes his jacket, drapes it on a chair; he does not remove the shoulder holster, which is empty. He contemplates the Assistant Secretary’s ancient suitcase as if the solution to his life were bundled up in it.

  He unpacks his clothes, takes out a slim chain, locks and binds the suitcase, chains it to the radiator.

  On the bed edge he sits upright for a long time as if expecting something. He has trained himself to wait immobile hour after hour, like a sniper, like a roadside African, like a poised hawk, ready for its chance, thinking of nothing.

  A dying fly comes to his face. It wanders. Its touch is weak and damp. He does not brush it away.

  BY THE RIVER at the north end of town is a public park established by his grandfather, at one time a part of the old Harkness estate. His father’s great-uncle, in the nineteenth century, had bought a large tract of valleyside and constructed a great ark of a house with an uplifting view of the magnificent Palisades across the river, and his descendants had built lesser houses in the park, in one of which, as an only child, he had spent the first years of his life.

  Not wishing to hurry, he does not go there on the first day, contenting himself with climbing the uphill street and buying a new address book. He must make sure that each day has its errand, that there is a point to every day, day after day.

  The real-estate agent, a big man with silver hair slicked hard and puffy dimpled chin, concludes that the old Harkness property will have just the “estate” that Mr.…? might be looking for.

  “Call me Ed,” the agent says, sticking out his hand. The client shakes it after a brief pause but does not offer his name.

  All but the river park presented to the village was sold off for development, the agent explains, when the last Harkness moved away some years before. But the big trees and the big stone houses—the “manor houses,” the agent calls them—are still there, lending “class” to the growing neighborhood.

  Mother says you are obliged to sell the house. I’d like to buy it.

  Absolutely not!

  THE NARROW ROAD between high ivied walls was formerly the service driveway, and the property the realtor has in mind is the gardener’s brick cottage, which shares the river prospect with “the big house” on the south side of an old stand of oak and hickory.

  As a child he fled his grandmother’s cambric tea to take refuge in this cottage full of cooking smells. His nurse was married to the gardener, and he knows at once that he will buy the cottage even if the price is quite unreasonable. So gleeful is he in this harmony of fate that his fingers work in his coat pockets.

  He has no wish to see the rooms until all intervening life has been cleaned out of them. Before the agent can locate the keys, he says, “I’ll take it.”

  When the agent protests—“You don’t want to look inside?”—he counts off five thousand dollars as a deposit and walks back to the car, slipping into the passenger seat, shutting the door.

  Not daring to count or pocket so much cash, the agent touches the magic bricks in disbelief. He pats the house as he might pat a horse and stands back proudly. “Nosir, they don’t make ’em like this, not anymore.”

  The one thing missing here is burglar lights, the agent says—a popular precaution these days, he assures his client, climbing back into the car. Like the man at the hotel, he evokes the human swarm emerging from the slums and coming up along the river woods at night. “Engage in criminal activity,” he emphasizes when the other man, by his silence, seems to question this.

  “Ready to go?” the client says, looking out the window.

  On the way home he inquires about New York State law in regard to shooting burglars, and the agent laughs. “Depends on his color,” he says, and nudges his client, and wishes he had not. “Don’t get me wrong,” he says.

  BACK AT THE OFFICE the agent obtains the buyer’s name to prepare the contract. “You’ve come to the right place, all right! Any relation?”

  The man from Africa ignores the question. He will reveal that he belongs here in his own good time. First he wants everything to be in place, the little house, its furnishings, his history. The place will be redone in the style of the big house across the hedge, with English wallpapers, old walnut furniture, big thick towels and linen sheets, crystal and porcelain, such as his parents might have left him, setting off the few good pieces he had put in storage after their deaths. The inside walls will be painted ivory, as the house was, and the atmosphere will be sunny and cheerful, with an aura of fresh mornings in the spring.

  Once the cottage is ready, his new life will commence, and the names of new friends will flower in his address book.

  TO HIS CHILDHOOD HOUSE he wishes to return alone, on foot. Since he means to break in, he makes sure that he leaves the hotel unobserved, that he is not followed. Not that there is anyone to follow him, it is simply a good habit, sound procedure.

  He enters the park by the iron gate beyond the railroad station, climbing transversely across a field, then skirting an old boxwood border so as not to be seen by the unknown people who have taken over his uncle’s house. He trusts the feel of things and not his sight, for nothing about this shrunken house looks quite familiar. It was always a formal, remote house, steep-roofed and angular, but now it has the dark of rottenness, of waterlogged wood.

  He hurries on, descending past the stables (no longer appended to his uncle’s house or frequented by horses, to judge from the trim suburban cars parked at the front). In the old pines stands a grotesque disc of the sort recommended to him by his would-be friend the agent, drawing a phantasmagoria of color from the heavens.

  He is seeking a childhood path down through the wood, across the brook, and uphill through the meadow.

  FROM THE TREES come whacks and pounding, human cries. A paddle-tennis court has spoiled the brook, which is now no more than an old shadow line of rocks and broken brush. Wary of his abrupt appearance, his unplayful air—or perhaps of a stranger not in country togs, wearing unsuitable shoes for a country weekend—the players challenge him. Can they be of help?r />
  He says he is looking for the Harkness house.

  “Who?” one man says.

  Calling the name—Harkness!—through the trees, hearing his own name in his own voice, makes him feel vulnerable as well as foolish, and his voice is thickened by a flash of anger. He thinks, I have lost my life while soft and sheltered men like these dance at their tennis.

  He manages a sort of smile, which fails to reassure them. They look at each other, they look back at him. They do not resume playing.

  “Harkness,” one man says finally, cocking his head. “That was long ago. My grandfather knew your father. Something like that.”

  Dammit, he thinks. Who said that was my name!

  Now the players bat the ball, rally a little. He knows they watch him as he skirts the court and leaves the trees and climbs the lawn toward the stone house set against the hillside at the ridge top.

  His father’s house has a flagstone terrace with a broad prospect of the Hudson. It is a good-sized stone house, with large cellar rooms, a downstairs, upstairs, and a third story with servants’ rooms and attic. Yet even more than his uncle’s place it seems diminished since his childhood. Only the great red oak at this south end of the house seems the right size, which confuses him until he realizes that in the decades he has been away it has grown larger.

  In a snapshot of himself beneath this tree, in baggy shorts, he brandishes a green garden stake shoved through the hole of a small flower pot, used as a hand guard. He is challenging to a duel the Great Dane, Inga.

  The oak stands outside the old “sun room,” with its player piano and long boxes of keyed scrolls, and a bare parquet floor for children’s games and tea dancing. The world has changed since a private house had a room designed for sun and dancing.

  The weather-greened cannon are gone from the front circle. Once this staid house stood alone, but now low dwellings can be seen, crowding forward like voyeurs through what is left of the thin woods farther uphill.

  Completing the circuit of the house, he arrives at the formal garden—“the autumn garden,” his mother called it, with its brick wall and flowered gate, its view down across the lawn to the woods and river. The garden is neglected, gone to weeds. Though most are fallen, his mother’s little faded signs that identified the herb species still peep from a coarse growth of goldenrod, late summer asters.