The River Queen Read online

  “Before what?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. I think something happened.…”

  “What happened?” I ask.

  He waves it off with his hand. “Oh, if he’s going downriver with Jerry, I’m sure he’s a good guy.”

  “Yeah,” the thin man nods as if he’s trying to convince himself. Suddenly Tom emerges from the boathouse, holding up the manifold in a clenched fist like a barbarian with his spoils. He shouts down to the boat to Jerry, “I think she’ll hold for now!”

  “For now?” I ask, “What does that mean?”

  Tom looks at me through disgruntled eyes. “For as long as she holds.”

  This seems to satisfy Jerry, who begins transporting the food he’s been keeping in the marina workshop fridge onto the boat and into the cooler on the deck. Eggs, orange juice, the largest loaf of Wonder Bread I’ve ever seen. Milk, a two-pound slab of Wisconsin cheddar. A family-size package of Chips Ahoy, which Tom stows above the fridge and devours by the fistful. There’s also two loaves of chocolate bread and a huge tin of molasses cookies.

  One of the cronies turns to me and says, “I’ve never seen so much food going into Jerry’s boat. Lotsa beer. But never that much food.”

  Jerry carts cases of diet Mountain Dew, diet Coke, and La Crosse beer in a wheelbarrow, and I follow in my flip-flops and robe. “Beer’s for ballast,” Jerry quips as he dumps a case into the cooler and smothers it with ice.

  My husband, Larry, suggested running a background check on these guys, but I resisted. I was seeing myself as Katharine Hepburn in the African Queen, but Larry was thinking Natalie Wood. Traveling with two river pilots named Tom and Jerry seemed like a safe bet to me. I envisioned a cartoon cat chasing around a savvy mouse. Now I’m not so sure.

  I’ve read stories of pilots who, for one reason or another, needed to lighten their loads. Before the river was managed and dredged, ships often ran aground. About a hundred years ago in the late fall when the river runs low, a packet ship filled with German immigrants got wedged onto a sandbar. In order to get off, the packet boat unloaded the sixty or so immigrants and their families. They unloaded their luggage. Then, as the boat floated off the sandbar, the crew left them in the middle of winter on Island 65 with minimum provisions, never to be heard from again.

  The river is filled with hundreds of nameless islands and secluded backwaters, those dark spaces on the navigational maps only experienced river pilots know. Ideal for depositing human remains. If I complain about the coffee or if I don’t want to swab the deck, what’s to stop them? The eagles would pick me down to the bones. The truth is, I don’t know these guys from Adam. I’m going on instinct and, as my husband is quick to point out, I’ve been wrong before.

  3

  IT WAS at my nephew Matt’s wedding two years ago that the idea of going down the river got into my head. Matt, a nationally ranked wrestler with a cauliflower ear and a bone-crunching grip, was marrying a lovely girl named Gail, a black belt in karate, who could “kill him” with swords, as Matt likes to brag. The wedding was being held in La Crosse on the banks of the Mississippi.

  The ceremony looked like a convention for bouncers. Matt’s wrestling team served as ushers, and they ate all the shrimp, then went to work on the mushroom caps. It was raining and gray, but as the strains of the wedding march were heard, the sun came out and the river glittered like gold—“a miracle,” the guests would later recall. After the reception the wrestlers built a bonfire and we sang “This Land Is Your Land” and “Little Boxes,” accompanied by an acoustic guitar and a set of bongos, as the river, dark, mysterious, and beckoning, churned by.

  The next day Larry and I went for a walk. It was a clear and crisp May afternoon and we needed to decompress from so much family time. As we strolled along the river, I spotted a houseboat. It was small and white with neat blue trim, shutters, an upper deck, white curtains in the windows—just sitting there, as if expecting company. I liked its name. Reckless Abandon. “Let’s have a look,” I said, and we wandered over.

  It was a small vessel, but it had a sweet galley, a nice roof deck, and some cramped sleeping quarters. Gazing through a window, we could see that the whole inside wasn’t much bigger than a kitchen in a Manhattan studio apartment. I walked around to the back where a man with a grizzled face sat with a fishing line in one hand, a cigarette in the other. “Is this your houseboat?” I asked.

  “Yes it is.”

  He flung his cigarette into the water and introduced himself as “Smokey” [sic]. “That’s cuz I smoke so much, but I’m gonna quit.”

  “Can we see it?”

  “Sure,” Smokey said. And he took us inside.

  I’d never been inside a houseboat before, but this was cozy. I liked the curtains, the windows, the open feel. “The nice thing about the Mississippi,” Smokey told us, “is that you can moor up wherever you go. If the weather gets rough, you can tie up to an island. You know, like Huck Finn, you can just go wherever you want to go.”

  As I looked out across the river, I tried to imagine what it would be like—going down the river in a houseboat like this one. Or maybe even this one. “Don’t let this river fool you,” Smokey went on. “She can be a bitch.”

  “How far can this boat go?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. As far as she wants, I guess.”

  “Could she go to Dubuque?”

  He gazed down the river.

  “I don’t know why not.” Smokey shrugged. “Never been there.”

  “Well, what about Hannibal?”

  Smokey considered this as he lit another cigarette, which he gripped in his yellowed hands, then puffed between his yellowed teeth. “Never been there either.”

  “Well, do you ever rent your boat to anyone? Would you ever think of that?”

  Smokey smiled through stained and ragged teeth. “Don’t know why not, if the price is right.”

  While Larry stared at me, dumbfounded, I handed Smokey a slip of paper and he wrote down three or four phone numbers: where he worked, where he tended to sleep, where he was supposed to live, and who might know where to find him.

  As we walked back to the hotel, Larry said to me, “You aren’t seriously thinking about traveling with that guy?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said. And under my breath, “Maybe I am.”

  Six months later I started calling Smokey. For a while, as I planned this journey, I had my heart set on renting his boat. I talked to him a few times. First he had an accident on his Harley and was out of commission. Then he left the ammo plant where he worked the graveyard shift. After that I kept calling and calling the numbers he gave me, but, much to my husband’s relief, I never reached him again.

  * * *

  When I made my decision to do this trip, I asked Matt to put up signs at the local marinas: WRITER SEEKS RIVER PILOT WITH HOUSEBOAT TO GO DOWNSTREAM. No one answered my ad. So I flew to La Crosse and Matt and I hung out at the Pettibone Marina on a sweltering July afternoon long enough for the harbormaster to tell us to go talk to Tom Hafner. Tom, he said, lives on a houseboat called the Samantha Jean on the other side of French Island. “I don’t have his number,” the harbormaster said, “but just go over there.”

  As we drove on to French Island toward Tom’s place, Matt pointed to a derelict house where a man kept his dead mother in the freezer for four years. “It wasn’t murder,” Matt assured me. “He just wanted to collect her Social Security.” We both gazed at the ramshackle house with its weedy front yard and collapsed Venetian blinds.

  “I guess nobody wants to live there now. But otherwise,” he said, with a sigh that did not inspire confidence, “La Crosse is safe. Just don’t go to La Plume Island at night. That’s where the bodies tend to wash up. It’s not that people are murdered at the marinas, but for some reason, maybe it’s the current, they wash up there.”

  We found the Samantha Jean moored in a grove of dark trees at the bottom of a slope and I sent Matt ahead on the wobb
ly dock and called out politely, “Tom? Is Tom Hafner here?”

  The boat rattled and water sloshed and soon a huge, forty-something man with a graying beard, bulging biceps, and considerable girth emerged. He seemed to favor one eye, or perhaps it was one ear, more than the other, but the slant of his face gave him a vaguely ominous look. “Howdy,” Tom said, crushing my fingers in his. We sat down and the boat rocked again, then seemed to sink. Small waves hit the sides.

  A mosquito bit my ankle as Tom offered us a can of diet Mountain Dew, which we declined. He popped one open as I explained that I wanted to go down the Mississippi River in a houseboat and I was looking for someone to teach me how to pilot. “After I learn how to pilot, I was thinking about renting the boat and doing the trip on my own,” I said.

  Guffawing laughter poured out of Tom and shook the boat. “First, you can’t do it on your own. Oh you could putter around a little here and there, but you can’t go through the locks and dams on your own, and you’ve got about twenty of those between here and St. Louis. You need a person to steer and at least one other to hold the lines. Really you need two. You can’t tie up on your own. How’re you going to anchor by yourself? What’re you going to do if you find yourself in fog? With a barge coming upstream? You probably don’t know how to navigate, do you?”

  He took a gulp of diet Dew, crushed the can, grabbed another. “You probably don’t even know how to stay on the main channel. And how’re you going to sleep on a riverbank alone? I wouldn’t let my girlfriend do that. I wouldn’t let my dog do that. Basically, forget about doing it on your own.”

  I agreed to forget it.

  “What you really need,” Tom went on as he popped open his second can of diet Dew, “is someone who wants to move a boat. You don’t want to hire an outfitter cuz that’s gonna cost you an arm and a leg. You know, fuel downstream and back because they gotta come home. You need to find a person who has a boat and wants to take it south. If I had a boat, I’d take you, but I don’t.…”

  I looked at the boat we were standing on. “Well, what about this one?”

  “Believe me, I wish I could.” He shook his head. “She’s not made for travel. Oh, she’s fine for around here, but I wouldn’t trust her in a storm. What you should do,” Tom said thoughtfully, “is talk to Jerry Nelson. Jerry was one of my first tormentors. He got me into my first boat. I’d trust him with my life. Jerry moves boats, big boats sometimes. You could just go stow away on one. Maybe just stick out your thumb and hitch a ride.”

  4

  THE FIRST time I was ever on a river was with my father. We had rented a boat on the Fox and my father steered. I was surprised that he knew how to pilot, but it seemed he had lived a different life before I was born, one I would rarely be privy to. My mother had packed a picnic of fried chicken and potato salad. My brother, John, and I were navigating. As we cruised the river, Dad said things like, “Mark seagull on right; mark tree on left.”

  We laughed because, of course, we understood even then that you cannot mark seagulls or trees. The seagulls will fly and the trees are everywhere. But we laughed because it was funny. Because my father laughed. We were happy that day, which wasn’t always the case.

  I hadn’t thought about that time on the Fox in years, but it came back to me as Matt and I pulled up to the French Island Yacht Club, where Jerry Nelson moored his boat. The docks were lined with houseboats with colorful awnings and painted trim, screened-in porches, and gas barbecue grills on the back. I admired the window boxes, where plastic flowers bloomed, and the beautifully appointed decks with vinyl furniture, where you could dine as the river drifts by. And they had nifty names like Shady Lady or Martin’s Fling, and, my personal favorite, Naughty Buoys.

  We wandered up and down the wooden planks, shouting for Jerry Nelson. After a few moments a tall and fit sixty-year-old man, pale for someone who spent all his time on the water, appeared on the bow of a houseboat. He wore khaki shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. “Are you Jerry Nelson?” I asked.

  “Yes I am.” He had a quizzical smile and just stared at me. I explained that I was a writer and I wanted to take a journey down the Mississippi. “I’m looking for someone who has a boat he wants to move,” I said, parroting what Tom had told me to say. “Someone who could take me down the river.”

  “Oh,” Jerry said. “I see.” He stood perfectly still as if he were frozen in space, and Matt and I were motionless beside him. He cocked his head at me in a way that I recognized from my father. I could tell that Jerry, like Tom, was hard of hearing in at least one ear.

  I grew up with a deaf man. My father had scarlet fever when he was a boy. Though he could hear music, he often couldn’t hear what was being said. Restaurants were particularly difficult. For the first fifteen years of my life, until he had a surgery, he never heard footsteps, the sound of a train’s wheels when he rode on it, voices on the telephone. In order to communicate, he shouted. In the end he shouted about many things.

  My father was charming, handsome, debonair, and people said he looked like Cary Grant. Greer (as in Greer Garson) and Cary, that’s how people referred to my parents. At one time he was considered to be Chicago’s most eligible Jewish bachelor. He was very much in demand, a fact that made my mother jealous, not of other women, but of his allure.

  But underneath, as my brother and I knew, my father was a very angry man. Seething in ways few could imagine. Street angel, house devil, the Yiddish expression goes. His temper was reserved for those closest to him and limited to peccadilloes, the smallest of things. To lights left on and dishes in the sink. Bread not broken before it was buttered. The offenses varied, but the result was the same.

  His anger was never physical. It was only words, but, as I’ve learned over the years, words can kill. The pitch of his voice would rise. I was always a little afraid of him. We all were. To this day his outbursts are incomprehensible to me. He never apologized. He never acted as if anything was wrong. He’d blow up and call us names, then make us popcorn or take us to play golf, as if nothing had happened.

  Now Jerry, with his head cocked the way I’d seen my father’s a hundred times, still hadn’t moved. I could tell that he was turning something over in his mind. After what seemed like a long while, he said, “Actually, I’ve got a boat I’ve been thinking about taking south.”

  “You do?” I was stunned.

  He nodded. “It’s an old houseboat. I want to start wintering in Mississippi on the Tenn-Tom. I’ve got some friends down in Portage Des Sioux who said I could dock with them over the winter, then I’d move her farther south next spring.”

  Jerry paused again and I took this as my cue. “So you have a boat that could make a trip like this?”

  “Well, not all the way, but…” He nodded. “Yes, I do.”

  “This boat?” I asked, pointing to the one we were standing on. It looked big and roomy with nice curtains and an outdoor grill. Jerry shook his head.

  “Nope. Another boat.”

  “Oh. Where is this boat? Can I see her?”

  Another pause. “Sure,” he said, not moving. “You passed her coming down.”

  He pointed to the parking lot, then slowly headed that way. I followed him up to where boats in various states of disrepair sat on trailers in dry dock. I had passed her coming down, but hadn’t noticed. That’s probably because she wasn’t much to look at. The paint was peeling from her hull in strips and it looked as if you could poke holes through the wood. A line of greenish brown muck that reminded me of pudding oozed from her baseboards. The railings were rusted away and smashed-up plastic chairs were piled on the stern. She had a FOR SALE sign taped to her back door and scribbled below it in pencil the words River Queen.

  “She’s been out of the water awhile,” Jerry offered by way of explanation. Three years in fact, he said as I climbed the rickety ladder onto the deck. The windows were so dirty I couldn’t see inside so Jerry popped open the door. It was about 140 degrees in the cabin and the floor was covered with power
tools and cardboard boxes filled with junk. Dust and grime coated every available surface. “So what d’ya think?”

  I was thinking that I’d seen other houseboats with their window boxes and Weber grills, sun awnings and deck chairs, but my options seemed to be running out. This was truly a wreck of a vessel, but I’d already taken leave of the college where I teach, my family and friends, and, some might add, my senses in order to make this journey in September. I’d squirreled away the money I’d need. If I was to begin in the fall, I had to come up with a plan.

  This seemed like a boat I could afford. Definitely within my budget. And she was only going one way. Besides, for whatever reason, perhaps a drug-induced haze, I had a vision of this little ship all white and shiny, carrying me downstream. Somewhere beneath the rust and peeling paint, I thought she had class.

  “Will you fix her up? I mean, before our trip?” Jerry looked puzzled as if he wasn’t sure what I meant. “You know,” I explained. “Clean her up.”

  “Well,” he said. “She could use a paint job. I’ll take care of that.”

  “And maybe get some … chairs? And, urn”—I gazed at the top deck—“some shade?” He nodded in what I assumed to be agreement. “Would she make it to Memphis?” I asked, trying to hide the skepticism in my voice. She looked as if she wouldn’t make it to the first lock and dam.

  “Oh, she’ll make it. She was built for Lake Michigan where the waves get high. But I’m only going to St. Louis.” The wheels in my head started to turn. I didn’t want to have to change boats in St. Louis. I wanted this boat to take me farther south.

  “Well, I have to get as far as Memphis … on this leg.” I had decided that I’d go to Memphis, take a break, then finish the trip.

  Jerry grumbled. “I don’t like the lower Mississippi very much. You ever looked at that part of the river? It can be boring and monotonous. You need to bring a very long book.” This coming from Jerry gave me pause.

  I had looked at the lower Mississippi. If you turn the map on its side, it looks like somebody’s very agitated EKG. As Mark Twain wrote, the lower Mississippi, which begins at Cairo, Illinois, is the “crookedest” river in the world. You go almost twelve hundred miles while the crow flies six hundred. Often on the lower Mississippi you are traveling as much east and west as north and south. And many of those miles had levees that kept you from seeing much beyond the riverbank itself. “But we’ll see,” Jerry said, nodding his head. “Memphis isn’t that much farther.”