The trouble was, he had not liked Lumumba. He had wondered if the Prime Minister might be unstable. Lumumba’s hostility toward Europeans flared and shuddered like a fire in the wind but never died. He ate distractedly in small brief fits, growing thinner and thinner. He was moody, loud, self-contradictory, he smoked too much hemp, he drank a lot, he took one woman after another despite his devotion to his wife, he could not stop talking or stand still.
WILD DUCKS PASS BY within gun range, flaring away from his little cove with hard quacks of alarm. He swings his arms as if holding a gun, and they crumple and fall in a downward arc as he follows through. Watching them fly onward, he feels an exhilaration tinged with loss that wild fowl still tried to migrate south along this shore of poisoned mud and rust and cinders. On a northeast wind, in rain, his hiding place would serve well as a duck blind, for in order to land into the wind the birds would hook around over the open water and come straight in to the gun.
More ducks appear farther upriver where the black stumps of an old dock jut from the surface. The long rust heads and silver-white bodies are magically unsullied in the somber water. There are five.
NEEDING SOMETHING to look forward to, he decides upon a sacramental hunt. A hunter’s stiff whiskey by the fire, the wild-duck supper with wild rice, the red Bordeaux from his mother’s old colonial crystal decanter—thus will he consecrate the return of the Harkness family to Arcadia. Since it will happen only once, he can’t be bothered with decoys, waders, far less a retriever. The river is too swift and deep to wade in, and in the unlikely event that a duck falls, the current is bound to carry it ashore.
To acquire a license to kill ducks he goes to Yonkers, not wishing to excite local curiosity. It seems absurd to bother about a license for one bird, when to shoot on the railroad right-of-way will be illegal in the first place. He applies for the permit for the same reason that he would feel obliged to retrieve and eat any bird he shot, rather than waste it. His father had been strict about licenses, bag limits, and using what one killed, even in the days when ducks were plentiful. To offend this code would violate the hunt ceremony in some way, make the supper pointless.
He has no proof of U.S. residence in the previous year—in the previous two decades, if it comes to that. He does not say this lest his very citizenship be challenged by the hostile young black woman, who says he will have to identify himself, submit proof of residence, proof of citizenship. But he has no driver’s license or certificate of birth, and can’t tell her that his passport has been confiscated.
“Next!”
As for the huge hunting license, it looks nothing like the duck-stamp badge his father had worn upon his fishing hat. The new license is worn on the back, to facilitate identification by the game warden. Though he knows it is foolish, he feels he is being tricked into the open. One might as well wear a bull’s-eye on one’s back.
“Next!”
Are the authorities suggesting, he inquires, that the duck hunter is stupid as well as lawless, that he will shoot over his limit and make off with his booty, yet neglect to remove this grotesque placard from his back?
“We ain’t suggesting nothing. That’s the law.” She waves him aside.
It disconcerts him that the hunter behind him in the line is black.
“Move along please! Next!”
While stalling, he folds a twenty-dollar bill into his application form and eases it back across the counter, at the same time requesting her to be more careful how she speaks to him. Raising her eyebrows at his tone, then at the money, she heaves around as if to summon her superior, giving him a chance to withdraw the bill. He does so quickly, winking at the black hunter, asking this female if he really requires proof that he is an American—doesn’t he look like one?
With the back of her hand, she brushes away his application form, which flutters to the floor.
“I could bust you, mister. You just watch your step.”
She is already processing the next application.
“Everybody looks American,” she is saying. “I look American. And you know what, mister?” She looks up at him. “I am American. More than you.” She points at the incomplete form in his hand. “I ain’t lived in Africa for half my life.”
Please do not confuse your activities in Africa with the foreign service, far less true service to your country, less still an honorable career that would make you a credit to this family.
When he raised his eyes, his mother averted hers. He flipped his father’s note back at her, in a kind of spasm. The letter struck her at the collarbone and fell into her lap. She looked down at it for a long moment, then picked it up between two fingers and set it on the table. Her eyes glistened.
You’ve changed so, Henry, dear. When you went off to war, you grew so hard. It wasn’t your fault, of course. Seeing all those dreadful things—it’s enough to confuse anyone, I’m sure!
Before he could protest, she had slipped away from him.
You were such a lonely boy. How I wish you’d found somebody. Or become a naturalist! she added brightly. Animals are so much easier, aren’t they?
Inappropriately, she tried to smile, as if to soothe him.
We shall always love you, dear.
His rivals killed him! he insisted. Mother? He had wanted to seize her, to shake from her frail body some pledge of loyalty. Patrice was the Soviets’ little macaque!
She opened her eyes wide in mock astonishment—Patrice?
And your little Mr. Mobutu, dear? The dictator? Whose macaque is he?
HE DECIDES he will need decoys after all. His father’s hand-carved balsa ducks, close-etched with wild colors, had been rigged with cedar keels and fine-smelling tarred cod line and square lead anchors on which the line was wrapped, leaving just enough room in the open center so that line and weight fitted neatly over bill and head. But sturdy wood decoys are no longer available, or not, at least, in these seedy river towns.
What are offered instead are swollen plastic mallards, drake mallards only, with heads the dead green of zinc alloy and the rest a bad industrial brown fit to attract those mongrel ducks that inhabited the dirty waters of the city parks and the pilings of old river docks in Yonkers. By means of gaudy plastic twine that would cut the hands in winter weather, each duck is rigged to a scrap of pig iron, sure to drag in any sort of wind.
He cannot bring himself to acquire more than three (Always set an odd number, his father had said, in case of a lone bird), since he would not harbor such horrors in his house, and does not intend to hunt ever again. So irritated is he by wasting money on such rubbish that he feels justified in commandeering a rain parka in its slim packet and a box of shotgun shells while he is at it.
At the cottage he finds a burlap sack for carrying and concealing the decoys, the dismantled gun, the shells, and a thermos of coffee in its leather case. That evening, he rigs a treble-hooked surf-casting lure on a length of line—a makeshift retrieval gear of his own devising.
Within a few days comes a forecast of northeast wind, with rain. Since his days are his own—the one activity left to him, now that the house is finished, is phoning for groceries, which are delivered daily—he will go hunting with the first change in the weather.
BEARING HIS SACK over his shoulder like a burglar, he makes his way down toward the river. In the darkness, each house is fortified by its hard pool of light, and he half expects that his flashlight, spotted at the wood edge by some nosy oldster out of bed to pee, will bring police from all directions, filling the suburban night with whirling red, white, and blue beacons—the Nigger Hunters, as the hotel clerk referred to them, conveying contempt for cops and blacks alike.
In the woods he descends wet shadow paths, his sack catching and twisting in the thorns. At the track edge he peers north and south through a grim mist that hides him entirely from the world, then crosses the railroad to the river.
He lobs the decoys out upon the current, and the wind skids them quickly to the end of their strings, which
swing too far inshore. In daybreak light, in choppy water, they in no way resemble three lorn ducks yearning for the companionship of a fourth.
He yanks his blind together, scrunching low as a train sweeps past toward the city. He feels clumsy, out of place, not nearly so well hidden as he had imagined. The upstate passengers, half-dozing in the fetid yellow light, cannot have seen him, though they stare straight at him through the grit-streaked windows. He breaks the light gun, loads two shells, and snaps it to, then sips his cup of coffee, peering outward.
As forecast, the wind is out of the northeast. Pale gulls sail past. But there is no rain, and the mist lifts, and the sun rises from the woods behind, filling the cliff faces across the river with a red-gold light.
The eerie windshine of the first day of a northeaster exposes the decoys for the poor things they are; the unnatural brightness of their anchor lines would flare a wild bird from five gunshots away. His folly is jeered at by clarion jays that cross back and forth among the yellow maples at the wood edge.
BANG
He has whirled and with a quick snap shot extinguished one of the jays, which flutters downward in the river woods like a blue leaf. He sinks back, strangely out of breath. And he is about to break his gun, retreat, slink home—he wants to drink—when there comes a small whispery sound, a small watery rush.
A black duck has landed just beyond the decoys. Struggling to make sense of its silent company, it quacks softly, turning back and forth. It rides the gray wavelets, wheat-colored head held high in wariness.
He has one shell left and no time to reload.
The gentle head switches back and forth, one eye seeking, then the other. In the imminence of the morning sun, in the wild light, the bird’s tension holds the earth together.
The duck springs from the surface with a downward buffet of the wings. In one jump it is ten feet in the air, drops of water falling, silver-lined wings stretched to the wind that will whirl it out of range.
BANG
The dark wings close. The crumpled thing falls humbly to the surface, scarcely a splash, as the echo caroms from the cliffs across the river.
In the ringing silence, the river morning is resplendent. Time resumes, and the earth breathes again.
The duck floats upside down, head underwater, red legs on the bronze-black feathers twitching.
Not a difficult shot, his father would have said. The trigger is squeezed when the bird levels off at the top of the jump, for just at that moment it seems almost motionless, held taut by wires—not a difficult shot.
How often in his boyhood he had missed it, turning away so as not to see his father’s mouth set at the corners. Then one day he outshot his father, finishing up with a neat double, trying not to grin.
With that second barrel he had overshot his limit. He had known this but could not resist, his father’s good opinion had seemed more important. The Assistant Secretary’s nod acknowledged the fine shot, but his voice said, You’ve always been good at things, Henry. No need to be greedy. It was no use blustering that he had followed through the double as his father had taught him. His father had no patience with excuses.
Often his mother felt obliged to say, Your father’s standards are so high, you see.
When he tried to ask just what she meant, she cut him off.
She smiled. Sometimes what I think you lack is a sense of humor.
He whirls his retrieval rig around his head and lets it go, looping the casting plug out beyond the duck, then tugging it back across the line of drift. On the third try it catches in the tail feathers and turns the bird around before pulling free. The next two tries are rushed, the last falls short.
The current has taken the diminished thing, it is moving more rapidly now, tending offshore.
Alone on the riverbank, peering about him, he takes a deep breath and regrets it, for the breath displaces his exhilaration, drawing into his lungs intuitions of final loneliness and waste and loss. That this black duck of the coasts and rivers should be reduced to a rotting tatter in the tidal flotsam, to be pulled at by the gulls, to be gnawed by rats, is not bearable, he cannot bear it, he veers from this bitter end of things with a grunt of pain. Or is it, he wonders, the waste that he cannot bear?
Something else scares him: he dreads going home alone and empty-handed, to the life still to be lived in the finished cottage. If the hunt supper does not take place, nothing will follow.
Sooner or later, the black duck must enter an eddy and be brought ashore. Hiding the shells and thermos under the driftwood, abandoning the decoys to the river, he hurries down the tracks toward the city, gun across his shoulder.
The bird does not drift nearer, neither does it move out farther. Wind and current hold it in equilibrium, a dull dark thing like charred deadwood in the tidal water. Far ahead, the cliffs of both shores come together at the George Washington Bridge, and beyond the high arch, the sinking skyline of the river cities.
The world is littered with these puppet dictators of ours, protecting our rich businessmen and their filthy ruination of poor countries, making obscene fortunes off the misery of the most miserable people on this earth!
The Assistant Secretary shifted his bones for a better look at his impassive son, as if he had forgotten who he was. He considered him carefully in a long mean silence. Who do you really work for these days, Henry? What is it that you do, exactly?
I am the government liaison with the western corporations.
And it’s your idea, I’m told, that these corporations pay these governments for the right to dump their toxic wastes in Africa.
When his son was silent, the old man nodded. I gather they pay you well for what you do.
Mother says you are obliged to sell the house. I’d like to buy it.
Absolutely not! I’d sooner sell it to Mobutu!
Didn’t you warn me once against idealism? The Cold War is not going to be won by the passive intrigues of your day—
Stop that at once! Don’t talk as if you had standards of your own—you don’t! You’re some damn kind of moral dead man! You don’t know who the hell you are, and I don’t either! You probably should have been an undertaker!
The old man rummaged his newspaper. When his son sat down by him, he drew his dressing gown closer. Stricken, he said, Forgive me. Perhaps you cannot help what you have become. I asked too much of you, your mother says, I was too harsh. He paused for a deep breath, then spoke shyly. I’m sorry, Henry. Please don’t come again.
THE MIST has lifted, the sun rises.
Trudging south, he is overtaken by the heat, the early trains. In his rain parka with the stiff canvas beneath, lugging the gun, his body suffocates. It is his entire body, his whole being, that is growing angry. The trains roar past, they assail him with bad winds, faces stare stupidly. He waves them off, his curses lost in the trains’ racketing. His jaw set in an iron rage, he concentrates on each railroad tie, tie after tie.
The dead bird is fifty yards offshore, bound for the sea. In the distance, the silver bridge glints in the mist. Nearer are the cliffs at Spuyten Duyvil, where the tracks turn eastward, following the East River. Once the bird had passed that channel mouth, he could only watch as it drifted down the west shore of Manhattan.
He trots a little. He can already see the rail yard and trestle where the tracks bend away under the cliffs.
5
THERE THEY ARE.
Perched on concrete slabs along the bank, thin dark-skinned figures turn dark heads to see this white man coming with a gun. Though the day is warm, they are wearing purple sweatshirts with sharp, pointed hoods drawn tight, as in some archaic sect in Abyssinia.
They pretend to ignore him, he ignores them, too. “Hey,” one says, more or less in greeting. Rock music goes loud then soft again as he moves past paper bags, curled orange peels.
In painted silver, the purple sweatshirts read:
LUMUMBA LIVES
On a drift log lies a silver fish, twenty pounds or more, with l
ateral black stripes from gills to tail. In the autumn light, the silver scales glint with tints of brass. Should he tell these Africans that this shining New World fish carries cancer-causing poison in its gut?
Beyond the Africans, on the outside of the tracks between rails and river, is a small brick relay station. The wrecked windows are boarded up with plywood, and each plywood panel is marked with a single word scrawled in harsh black:
NAM COKE RUSH
Crouched behind the station, he hides the gun under a board, slips his wallet into a crevice, then his shoulder holster. He fits a shard of brick.
The plaint of a train, from far upriver. The Africans teeter on their slabs, craning to see where he has gone. The sun disappears behind swift clouds.
He strips to his shorts and picks his way across dirtied weeds and rocks, down to the water edge.
Where an eddy has brought brown scud onto the shore lie tarred scrap wood and burnt insulation, women’s devices in pink plastic, rusted syringes, a broken chair, a large filth-matted fake-fur toy, a beheaded cat, a spent condom, a half grapefruit.
Ah shit, he says aloud, as if the sound of his own voice might be of comfort. He forces his legs into the flood, flinching in anticipation of glass shards, metal, rusty nails through splintered wood.
The hooded figures shout, waving their arms. They yell again, come running down the bank.
His chest is hollowed out, his lungs yawn mortally. He hurls himself outward, gasping as the hard cold strikes his temples, as a soft underwater shape nudges his thigh. In his thrash, he gasps up a half mouthful of the bitter water, losing his breath as he coughs it out, fighting the panic.
Rippling along his ear, the autumn water whispers of cold deeps, green-turning boulders. The river is tugging at his arms, heavy as mercury, entreating him to let go, to sink away. Through the earth’s ringing he can hear his arms splash, as the surface ear hears the far whistle of a train, as yells diminish.
On the River Styx: And Other Stories Page 17
