A picnic table from town floats upside down near my bank. I tie a brick to a rope and chase the table a half mile before lassoing it on a lucky shot. I loop the rope around a tree. When the flood goes away, I’ll drag the table into our yard. We’ll have picnics and carve our names into the wood. I am practicing for the role of provider. My boots are scuffed and muddy.
The current is slower in the space just after a bend, and I watch a brave cormorant trying to fish there. Its skinny neck pokes from the surface like a snake. They migrate twice yearly and this one must have gotten lost in the storm, separated from its flock. Cormorants lack the waterproofing oil of ducks, thus are able to swim underwater, hunting fish. A thousand years of this has given them huge webbed feet set far enough back on the body to act as flippers. This makes them top-heavy. When a cormorant tries to walk on land, it falls to its chest like a dog on ice.
I feel a similar awkwardness now, unsure of what I’ve done, what I must later do. I’m not afraid of aging but of how the aged are supposed to behave. Science claims that human superiority is the result of a prolonged infancy and childhood; it seems more like luck to me. The cormorant can swim and fly, like the baby in Rita’s womb. I am stuck with common walking. This flood is nothing compared with the coming deluge.
A ruined canoe has jammed itself into the riverbank, rearing like a tombstone marking the future of the past. Its dark, shiny bow reminds me of the dolphins who attempted dry terrain eons back. They slid onto the sun-warmed rocks and stayed long enough to lose their gills and miss the sea. Many dolphins fled to safety, but an outpost remained. They slowly became earless seals, marooned forever at the edge of dirt and water, I wonder if fatherhood will be the same.
~ ~ ~
I left Kentucky as soon as the doctor pronounced me healed, a diagnosis only physically correct. I roamed the country on foot, finding day labor and cheap rooms. I was a perpetual new face, the truck stop beggar, the sleeper on a bench, a tired battered bum not quite twenty-one. Each time my life became simple, a boss offered a promotion, or a woman wanted love. Fearing a trap, I grabbed my pack and left another life behind, heading like Daniel Boone for elbow room.
I moved vaguely through America and picked up a few more jobs — moving furniture, picking fruit, tarring a roof, driving a truck — all of which I despised. The effort of labor reminded me of a hangover. If you can only get through the next few hours, both come to an end. The tough part is accepting the wait until you can eat and drink again.
In autumn, a trucker left me in Minneapolis, a city as cold as a crowbar. At the employment office a young Chippewa offered me a place to stay. Marduk led me through glass tubes suspended over the city into a neighborhood of rickety buildings instead of the bison hide tipis I expected. Smoke signals emanated from the St. Paul factories across the river.
Daniel Boone had left civilization for a simpler life, killed his first buffalo in Kentucky, and was captured by the Shawnee. He took the name Sheltowee, which meant “Big Turtle.” Boone’s rite of adoption involved the careful plucking of hair to leave a scalplock. He was then stripped and scrubbed raw at a river to take his white blood out. My friendship with Marduk began on easier footing.
He was my age, trapped between rebellion against the traditions of his people and a hatred for Scandinavian whites. He told me there were more unearthed Indians in museums than were alive in the country. His great-grandmother was on display in Chicago. Marduk’s father owned a car wash and wanted him for a partner; his mother was a powwow dancer, active in tribal rights. Marduk had no interest in either way of life. He wanted someday to enter the South American jungle and be a “real Indian.” Pinched hard by both ends of his own culture, he lived among the city’s newest immigrant group, the Hispanics.
Our roommates were twin brothers from Ecuador who considered Kentucky another country. We were all foreigners in the land of the free. When we drank rum, Marduk locked himself in his room to smoke dope, shouting through the door, “I will not be a drunken Indian!”
Luis and Javier were rare men who had actually achieved their childhood dream — employment as small-time gangsters. They lived better than they had at home. By North American standards, we were all poor as dirt, but the brothers desired no more than the life of a quiet desperado — a quality I envied. My ambitions were vague as mist. I spent most of my days at the museum, studying the edges of canvases, pleased to find sloppy craftsmanship. I filled my journal with opinions on art. My eventual work would show the world what was wrong with contemporary painting.
At night the three of us plunged into the icy streets, wind scything our legs and watering our eyes. We hurried from bar to bar, delivering illegal punchboards and occasionally the prize money. My presence helped when dealing with white bartenders. Given to bravado, Luis and Javier told me extravagant lies about our activities, but their tense silence informed me when we were transferring large sums. If they entered a back room, I was posted near the door as lookout. They never advised me on what to do in case of trouble.
A special mission sent us to an empty bar with few tables, more of a private club than a working saloon. The boys were delivering a payoff for the crooked punchboards, a fixed payoff in fact, a reward for someone who’d been told what number to choose, at which bar, on the specific day. It was the return of a favor. We were part of a string of cutout men, thereby making the money impossible to track.
A cop walked in and asked me where the bartender was. I shrugged, hoping the dim light would prevent his noticing the outbreak of sweat on my forehead. I began to wonder what form Luis and Javier’s retribution would take if I failed to warn them.
“I’m homesick for Kentucky, buddy,” I said. “Help me on the chorus, will you.”
I began singing “My Old Kentucky Home,” loud and out of tune. The bartender hurried from the back room. The cop raised his eyebrows at me, and the bartender tapped his temple while rolling his eyes. The cop nodded. I continued to sing. The bartender passed a thick envelope to the cop, who left.
Luis and Javier were very proud of my behavior and promised to recommend me to the boss. The bartender set us up with round after round, and by evening’s end, we had sung “My Old Kentucky Home” so many times that the regulars had either joined in or left for a quieter place.
We stumbled home, where the brothers found Marduk asleep in a full bathtub with a one-hit bong on the floor. They hurried to my room, whispering demands that I come and see. When I refused, they became belligerent and dragged me to the bathroom. Marduk’s arms hung over the sides of the tub. His head was tipped against the back rim. Floating between his legs was the largest lingam I’d ever seen. I stared with awe, remembering that only one tenth of an iceberg is visible above the water line. Javier flicked an empty toilet paper roll into the tub. Marduk’s lingam drifted like a whale in the riffle, dwarfing the cardboard tube.
Luis whispered that Marduk had never known a woman. Twice he’d tried, with disastrous results that sent the females running in fear. The twins shook their heads in disappointment over the Wasted Monster, as they called it.
“Women are lucky,” said Luis, “the Indian has the Monster and not me. They would not be safe if it was mine.”
“You would be killed,” answered Javier. “A husband would shoot you and cut the Monster off.”