The Dead Man’s Boat: Revisited
We are down by the river, fishing for fish, when we see what it is that we see. What we see is there is a man, walking across the muddy river’s muddy water, this man, he is walking right up to us brothers. Boys, this man says. Brothers, he adds. I’m looking for my boat. Have you seen it, my boat? is what this man with his man’s mouth says. This man, his mouth, it is a hole in his face with a fish sticking its fish head out of it. When he sees us looking at him like this, like he is a man with a fish sticking out of his mouth, he spits this fish out into the river. This fish, when it hits the river, into the river it swims away. We see lots of boats is what us brothers say next to this man. There are lots of boats running up and down up and down this river with people inside them fishing for the river’s fish. But us brothers, we say to this man, we do our fishing standing right here on the river’s muddy shore. Us brothers don’t need us a boat. Must be lots of fish in this river if there’s lots of boats fishing this river for fish is what this man says to this. It wouldn’t be a river without the fish that make the river what it is, is what us brothers say then to this. Brother adds, What’s your boat look like? That might help us to tell you if we think we’ve seen it. If one of you brothers stood on the other brother’s shoulders, you’d need two more brothers of you to be as big as my boat is big, this man says. That’s big, Brother says to this. It’s big enough is what this man says then to this. What else? Brother asks. What else do we need to know? My boat, this man tells us, it’s made out of steel. Steel, us brothers say. A boat made out of steel? Us brothers, we give each other this look. There is this look that us brothers sometimes like to look at each other with. It’s the kind of a look that actually hurts the eyes of the brother who is doing the looking. Imagine that look. Maybe, we say, to this man, it sank, we say, to this man. This man, when we say this to this man, he looks down at us brothers with eyes that are made out of steel. What makes you say that? is what this man says to us brothers then, looking at us with this cold steel look looking out from his cold steel eyes. Steel sinks is what us brothers say to this. Like stones, we tell him, and we reach down to the river’s muddy bank and pick up from the mud into our boy fists two fist-sized stones that we throw out into the river. Both of these stones, when they hit the river’s muddy water, these stones turn into fish. Us brothers, we don’t say anything to this man about this. What we do say, though, is this. Mister, we say. Maybe you should look with your look beginning at the bottom of the river. Start looking there is what we tell him. This man, he looks the look in his cold steel eyes down upon us brothers, us standing down by this muddy river’s muddy shore, then he looks his look up into the sky above the river where the sun is somewhere shining. This man, he is nodding with his man head as he searches the above-the-river sky, looking there, into the clouds, so it looks like to us, for his boat made out of steel, then he turns and walks out into the river from which, he just a little while ago, came walking out across it, like a stone that somebody skipped. The river, this time, it does not hold this walking man up. The river, this time, it is a fish’s big fish mouth opening up and swallowing down inside of it a fish as small as a man’s last breath.
The Dead Man’s Boat: Revisited
Us brothers, we took us our mud and our fish-fishing poles baited with worms and rust and mud and we hopped up into the dead man’s boat, that boat that we found washed up on our dirty river’s dirty shores, and we headed ourselves upriver, up past the shipwrecked mill where our father used to go inside to work, it sitting dark and silenced and fireless there on the river’s muddy bank, up around the bend in the river, past the other string of mills farther north along the river, mills with fires still burning there inside them, up toward where the beaded lights of that big steel bridge stretching from our side of the river all the way over to the river’s other side, it was all lit up in the night like a constellation of sunken-ship stars, each star shining out in the nighttime’s dark like the shiny heads of nails hammered into some backyard pole. We were chugging along, us brothers, with Brother sitting up in the bow, holding up a lantern’s light for us to better see the river by, and the brother that I am was kneeling in the back of the boat, what’s called the stern, with one hand on the outboard’s tiller, the other hand hanging itself over the edge of the boat, the fingers of that hand dragging themselves across the muddy skin of the river. We were on our way upriver, up to the where the dirty river that runs through our dirty river town, it runs all the way up through the city, us brothers heading up there to see if we might catch us some of the big city’s big dirty river fish, when out of nowhere in the night and in the river’s muddy dark we heard, then saw, a boat, much bigger than ours, it was cutting across and down the river, it was heading right for us brothers. There’s a boat coming right for us, Brother turned his head and said as he held up the lantern light with that fire glowing inside it so that his face flashed full like the moon. I looked up at Brother then. There was a look that us brothers sometimes liked to look at each other with. It was the kind of a look that actually hurt the eyes of the brother who was doing the looking. Imagine that look. Do I look like a brother born blind? was what I said to Brother then, and I cut the tiller hard and to the right. But that boat, that other boat much bigger than ours, that boat with us brothers not sitting down inside it, it kept on coming toward us brothers, as if it didn’t see us brothers, as if us brothers weren’t even there. But it saw us, this boat, the people sitting there inside it: this, us brothers, we knew. When we moved it, our boat, it moved closer toward where it was we moved. And before we knew what next to do, because we knew we couldn’t outrun it, this boat, it was soon coming across our bow, it was doing what it could do to hit us, this boat, even though we didn’t, we couldn’t, know why. What did we, us brothers, do, to a boat like this boat? Us brothers, all we ever really did out on the river was fish. We didn’t know what we should do, us brothers, other than what we ended up doing. Us brothers, the both of us brothers, we both jumped, heads first, out of our boat, the dead man’s boat, the dead man who fell into the river pissing into the river for luck, we headed ourselves, down into the river, and we swam ourselves down to get us away from this coming-after-us boat. When we stuck up our boy heads up out of the river, to see if we were both of us still alive, to see where our boat was, to see where that other boat was, all us brothers could see was our boat drifting its way back and down the river, back to from where us brothers, ourselves, had just come from. That other boat, it seemed, had all but disappeared, and not even the sound of it could be heard by our ears. Our boat, the dead man’s boat, away from us brothers, it had drifted too far away from us brothers for us to be able to swim back to it for us to get back in it. So, us brothers, we swam ourselves toward the river’s muddy shore, we swam ourselves out of us brothers’ breath, and plopped ourselves down in the mud at the edge of the river. Yes, like a couple of out-of-water fish, us brothers, there in the mud, we sucked in at the air until the sky above us, it helped us brothers to begin breathing. We stood up, in the mud, out of the mud, but we did not wipe the mud off us. Us brothers, we liked mud and the fishy river smells that always smelled of river and mud and fish. With mud in our eyes, us brothers, we turned to look one last time back downriver, to where our boat, the dead man’s boat, it had floated downriver and down around a bend in the river and almost out of sight, this boat with our fishing poles inside it, our buckets empty of fish. Us brothers, we didn’t know what we were going to do, or how we were going to get back home, now that we didn’t have us brothers a boat to take us back home in. So what us brothers did was, we figured it, in our boy heads, that it was too early in the night for us to head ourselves back home. We’d gone out, that night, out onto the river, out on the river in the dead man’s boat, to spend the dark night fishing. It was what us brothers did, at night, and in the morning, and sometimes, too, in the day: we fished. Our mother and our father both believed that we were brothers sound asleep in our beds when we stepped outside through our bedroom’s window and slipped, as we always did, down to the river. We had until the sun’s rise for us brothers to get us back home before our father would call out to us to wake us with the word, Son. When our father called out to us brothers, Son, we both knew, we were crossing that dirty river together. But us brothers, we didn’t want to go back home, to bed, in a room in a house with our mother and father asleep in it. Our house, with our mother and father in it, it was not the kind of a house that us brothers liked to go back to. The river, out fishing on the river, that was where us brothers liked to be. But now, us brothers, we didn’t have us brothers a boat to be out on the river in, we didn’t have us our fish-fishing poles for us to fish for our fish with, we didn’t have us our buckets of mud and rust and worms for us brothers to bait our hooks with. It was just us brothers now standing on the upriver banks of a river and a city that was not ours. Our mother and our father both had often told us brothers that the city was not a place for us boys to be. Don’t ever go, was what our mother told us. But us brothers, we didn’t much like to listen to what our mother liked to tell us. Our mother, she was the kind of a mother who told us brothers not to walk through mud, a mother who told us to wash our hands before we ate, our hands that always smelled of fish, our hands with mud dried hard in our palms. We liked mud and we liked it the way the fish’s fishy silver scales stuck to our hands. These were fish that we fished out of the dirty river that runs its way through this dirty river town, fish that we took these fish back home with us and we gutted the guts out of those fish, we cut off the heads off of those fish, and then we hammered them, those fish, those fish heads, into the backyard telephone pole out back in the back of our yard. In the end, there was exactly a hundred and fifty fish heads, hammered and nailed into that pole’s creosoted wood. Each fish, each fish head, us brothers, we gave each one a name. Not one was called Jimmy or John. Jimmy and John was mine and my brother’s name. We called each other Brother. Brother, Brother said to me then. What do you want to do? Brother was the brother of us brothers who always liked to ask these kinds of questions. To Brother, I did not know what then to say. Us brothers, we stood there like that on the dirty river’s dirty banks, and we looked around this place that us brothers, we’d been told, this was not the kind of a place for us brothers to be. But this place, this city with this dirty river running through it, it didn’t look much different than the town that was ours with its dirty river running through it and with its dirty river mill built up along its dirty river banks, its smokestacks that stained the sky the color of rust and mud. We liked a sky that was stained the color of rust and mud. Our mother once let it be known to us brothers that there was a sky, there was a sky, our mother told us, bigger than the sky above the river that was ours. Us brothers, we couldn’t picture this, a sky bigger than the sky that was our backyard. We couldn’t picture a town without a dirty river running through it where us brothers could run down to it to fish. This is our river, was what we said to our mother then, and this was what I said to Brother too. This is our river, I said, then. There’s no place else for us to be. We stood there, like this, for a while, like this, just standing there along the edge of the river. The moon in the sky had not yet begun to rise. The sky, it was mostly dark. Behind us, away from the river, most of the ho