Chris Offutt - The Same River Twice - A Memoir

“Now you will meet Maria,” Luis whispered.

“She is our cousin.”

“Aunt Tiamat is our aunt.”

“You are stupid!” Javier said. “Chrissie is not stupid. He knows who is who.”

Outside, a freight train moved through town, its whistle a sound of mourning. I was trapped without a Cumberland Gap in sight, stuck like Boone with a local squaw.

Aunt Tiamat glided regally into the room and presented Maria like a valuable flintlock in red high heels. She was petite and brown with a breast-tilt that defied gravity. Each ankle was thin as a worry line. María was at her maiden’s peak and I knew how Daniel had felt when he saw the purity of untouched land.

Luis and Javier stood stiff-backed as southern gentlemen until Aunt Tiamat dismissed them with a slight gesture of her wrist. They sidled out the door, winking at me. She led Maria away and returned to pour two brandies. After a sip, she spoke.

“María says she is in love with you.”

“What!”

“Because you will marry her.”

“I won’t.”

“You must.”

“Why?”

“Because she is in love with you.”

For a few minutes I pondered the idea, thinking of those red high heels. I could pass her off as Shawnee in Kentucky and we’d live on rice and beans. My family would understand. We’re flexible in the hills. One of Rebecca Boone’s babies was fathered by Daniel’s brother, the penalty for her husband’s wandering.

Aunt Tiamat refilled our glasses. Regardless of Maria’s beauty, I didn’t want a wife of convenience. As businessmen, Luis and Javier could understand my refusal, but they’d consider it a betrayal of their aunt’s decree, a stake higher than their own honor. It was time to use the lessons they’d taught me.

“Marduk is better,” I said. “He’s learning Spanish.”

“Who?”

“The Indian. You know.”

I spread my hands to indicate size. Her eyes narrowed and the glass trembled slightly in her hand.

“El monstruo,” she said.

“Yup.”

“It is true?”

“Yup.”

“He would be too much for María.”

“But not for you. He could marry Maria and live here. Shell get citizenship.” I stepped close, dizzied by her perfume, and slowly flipped my hole card.

“Marduk has never been with a woman.”

Aunt Tiamat gripped a chairback, her eyes wide as castanets. A faint seam of perspiration gleamed along her upper lip.

“Take me to him,” she said. “You must keep my nephews away this night.”

She telephoned for a taxi and didn’t speak during the ride. I let her in our hovel. She handed me a wad of bills and shooed me away. In a nearby bar Luis and Javier were drinking with a pair of neighborhood hookers. The brothers met me at the door.

“It’s settled,” I said. “Aunt Tiamat gave me money to celebrate. How much do they want?”

We looked across the dim room at the whores.

“Twenty,” said Luis.

“And mine is worth thirty.”

“Then I believe,” Luis said, “that mine is worth forty.”

“Mine wants forty-five.”

“You two stay here,” I said.

For a hundred bucks and a bottle of rum, the women promised to keep them until noon the next day. Luis hugged me. Javier hugged me, then kissed me on the cheek. Luis pushed his brother aside, lifted me off the floor, and kissed me on both cheeks. Javier reached for me. I ran for the door, wiping beer spittle off my face. Boone probably kissed a favorite hound dog but never another man.

In the street I realized that I had nowhere to go for the night, and would have to leave town. I snuck into our apartment for my belongings. Marduk’s bed thumped in time to his wailing Chippewa song, Geb finally opening the matrix of Nut. I filled my backpack and walked across town beneath a full moon flat as a tortilla in the cloudless sky. Maria opened the door.

“ Mi novia,” she murmured.

I embraced her and we mangled each other on the couch. Either Maria had lied to the twins or they had lied to me; she was no virgin. We fit together like Lincoln logs. When the calamity was over and Maria lay nestled against me, I began thinking of water and movement. Tomorrow Minnesota and its thousand lakes would be one more place to which I’d never return.

Daniel Boone came home once a year to rest, resulting in sixteen kids. The same year that Kentucky honored him by giving a county his name, two sheriffs stole ten thousand acres of his land to sell for taxes. He left the state in 1799, feeling crowded by the appearance of a new neighbor twenty miles away. At age eighty-five, he died the hero’s death — choking to death on a sweet potato.

Rising at sunup, I dressed and fixed a cup of coffee, Maria found me in the kitchen lacing my boots. Sunlight polished her mahogany skin and winked on the curls below her flat belly. Chilly air starched her nipples. She stepped forward, slapped me across the face, kissed me quickly, and ran from the room. The ghost of Daniel whispered that I should leave. Not being Quaker like Boone, Luis and Javier’s method of vengeance might include all eight bullets from the little.22. I stepped into the dawn streets and walked to the meat market, where a trucker carried me west.

Summer for me has always been a time of hibernation, a hallucinatory season to be endured. This one is passing in a fury of photosynthesis and intimacy. Rita has kept her job for the insurance, while her belly grows. A small magazine has accepted a short story and sent me a check for fifty-four dollars. It’s my third publication, the first that paid. Rita is happy. The check validates her decision to have a child with me, proves that my days as a bum are gone. I take her to town for dinner. The bill is low since Rita is eating five small meals a day instead of three large ones.

The rest of the money buys fabric to make curtains for the baby’s room. After borrowing a sewing machine, I manage to produce two hemmed strips that will fit no window in the house. They hang at a slant. Sunlight borders the sides; the bottom is eight inches below the windowsill. I am prouder of them than of getting published.

Every morning I take coffee to the river and sit in the same chair where I ended the previous night with beer, I prop my feet on a sandbag left from the flood. Now, in late July, drought is killing the corn, and the river has dwindled to a creek. The morning stillness is broken only by the symphony of birds claiming turf, and my neighbor’s boat as he checks his catfish lines. To him the river is a tool. He’s trapped and fished it for two decades.

Twenty-five hundred years ago, a Greek named Heraclitus said, “You can’t step into the same river twice.” I climb down the bank and remove my shoes and socks. The river is warm on my skin, a continuous flow that is immediately gone, yet remains. The water surrounding one leg is not the same as around the other leg. Sediment drifts away and it occurs to me that you can’t even step on the same bank twice. Each footstep alters the earth.

Heraclitus is known as “the Obscure” because none of his writings survived. My neighbor has no use for his ideas. To him the river is always the same, moving past his house, providing food. He steps into it every day. He gauges the spots to set his poles by the texture of mud beneath his feet. I spread my legs as far as I can. One foot is Heraclitus, the other is my neighbor. I am floating somewhere in between. Wind in the high boughs makes the leaves ripple like water, producing a distant whisper. Fish eggs cling to rock along the shore.

Rita’s eggs are thirty-four years old. She wanted amnioscentesis to eliminate the worry of producing a baby less than perfect. Her uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandparents all died in World War II — some in combat, some in death camps. Rita can never be sure what genetic oddities run in the family. Her feet are flat and she has dyslexia. One of my eyes is farsighted, the other nearsighted. As a kid, I had big teeth bucked so badly that four molars were yanked to make room.