Chris Offutt - The Same River Twice - A Memoir

I pulled my hands from the flipper compartments, worked my arms into position, and treated the crowd to the rare sight of a walrus decapitating itself. The mask splashed into the water. I retched a stream that arced from Louie’s neck. Kaybach stepped into the pool and yelled for everyone to leave. People were screaming and demanding refunds.

I swam to the safety of my fake ice floe. Water had gushed into the oilskin suit, and briefly I feared drowning. I left the costume in the water, crawled to the edge of the tent, lifted the canvas and inhaled. The hundred-degree air tasted sweet and glorious. Sideshow tents were butted against the big top with a small space in between for stakes and ropes. I fled down the alley in my underwear. Peaches and Barney were gone from the truck. I rinsed my body in a tub of her drinking water and dressed in my extra clothes. The parking lot was a rolling field with beat-down grass. Locals worked it for a few bucks and a free pass. The third car picked me up. Twenty minutes later I stood in a town, the name of which I didn’t know.

I oriented myself so the setting sun lay on my left, and began walking north. The Drinking Gourd emerged at dusk. Kentucky produced both Abe Lincoln and Jeff Davis. Like Kentuckians of the Civil War, I was loyal to no direction. I was neither kinker nor freak, yankee nor reb, boss nor bum. I wasn’t much of a playwright either.

Autumn has fled in a blur of wind and leaves. The first frost never let up, clamping cold to the earth. Rita is now nine months and one week pregnant. If the baby doesn’t volunteer soon, the doctor will induce its birth in a week. Beside the front door is a suitcase packed with food, diapers, cigars, a deck of cards, and a baby-naming book that reminds me of a wildlife identification guide. Rita is weary of her awkward gait, my incessant presence underfoot. I am powerless to comfort her. She listens to an inner music and I hear only the tow of the woods.

The sky is domed solid blue, pale at the edges as if the world floats inside a balloon. Beyond the perimeter lies endless time, an absence of gravity and light, the very world in which our child exists. The fetus is said to dream in utero. I suppose it must recall the passage of its own brief time — the fifth week of its gills and tail, the later limbless period when its organs were blooming. At week twenty-six it forms bones. A month later the brain doubles, increasing its capacity to dream.

Last night I dreamed that Rita gave birth to a boy who was also my father. I became the middle man, discarded and ignored. This morning Rita lay on her side with hands clasped below her bulging belly, as if proffering her child to the world. She said the baby kicked all night, I stoked the fire and left for the woods.

Wind pushes snow away from the river, forming a powder that shifts like vapor. These ground blizzards demolish vision. It is as if one walks through a haze of chalk. Because I would prefer a son, I say that I want a girl so as not to be disappointed. Rita is honest. She stakes her claim for a boy-child early, choosing faith in her own biology. She has no use for common hope.

There are more females born per year because the X sperm lives slightly longer while hunting the egg. Less likely to be born, men are more prone to death. I am the first son of a first son of a first son, and I want to continue the cycle. Rita says it is a boy. I hope she knows.

Cold air numbs my face above my beard. On certain days the radio forbids pregnant women from drinking tap water. We buy it in gallon jugs, wondering when the amnion will break. Rita recently woke from a nap lying in dampness, the sheets cold against her flesh. She called to me, her voice excited, certain that the time had come. I raced to her side. The sheets were stained pale violet, a color that scared me. My mouth was dry. I rubbed the sheet and sniffed my fingers, surprised at the faint scent of grapes. Rita rolled over. Buried in the blankets beside her was an empty glass of juice. Laughter arrived, always overdue, evidence of life.

Last month offered a blue moon, the second full moon in the same month. It was the brightest moon of our lifetime, closer to earth than any time since 1912. Both coasts were drenched by enormous tides. Since humans are sixty percent water, perpetually hauling eleven gallons inside our bodies, the moon affects us, too. I thought it might draw the baby from the womb, but Rita didn’t even have Braxton-Hicks, contractions that are known as false labor pains. First-time mothers take longer to give the baby up. First-time fathers, I’ve found, take longer to get to sleep at night.

Rita is the focus of our lives, her belly the pinpoint. I feel the futility of a laid-off worker, the fading sense of being useful. I am left with the memory of our last sex two months ago, in which the child had literally come between us, or swayed below. I’d felt as though I were trespassing, hoping not to damage whatever lived inside.

The wind halts abruptly and I see faint fox tracks at the bottom of a rise. Blown snow fills the upwind side of the prints, which remind me more of a cat than a dog. I follow the trail, aware that seeing a wild animal requires giving up hope, the same way Rita has abandoned her hope for gender. She simply knows. Wind whips mist in the air and I crouch, aiming ray face along the path of tracks. Snow is against my eyes, down my collar. My bad knee begins to ache. The fox never hunts with hope for prey, but with yarak, an Arabic word without English equivalent that means “hunting condition, ready to kill.” As we lost our animal instincts, we replaced them with the veils of reason, love, superstition, and hope. No fox ever hoped for gender. Only humanity hopes, which makes us the most hopeless.

At birth my child’s brain will be equal in size to the brain of a baby gorilla. My father is bald and toothless, exactly the way he was born. By prolonging childhood, we are able to learn the alphabet, mathematics, the sense of awe and doubt, how to kill for pleasure. The palm of a Down’s baby has two lines instead of three, like that of an ape. My father’s palm is often damp. When I made mistakes as a child, he referred to me as a cretin, and I felt proud, believing it meant I was from the island of Crete. I hope for a son who is not like me.

Cardinals slice the air like drops of blood. The wind slows, leaving a drift against a sapling, a larger drift on the parent tree. The fox prints have faded into the swept forest floor and I move in the direction they were headed, trying to imagine the fox making detours around piles of brush, angling for the water’s edge. Ice floes drift in silence. A daughter makes better sense because I’m liable to do more damage to a son. It is my heritage, my instinct, as powerful as a barred owl’s claws in the back of a squirrel.

The trunks of maples along the river are too large for their height, the roots having sucked water for decades, expanding their bodies but not their boughs. They have overevolved, like the Spartan, the Roman, the ancient dwellers of Crete. Wind from the south coats the side of each maple with snow. The other side grows moss. Various animals live in their hollow bodies, kicking all night. A child grows within Rita’s belly and I hope that my professed hope for a girl goes unanswered. Ahead of me the fox knows better than to hope I leave. It merely waits, knowing that I will go.

I follow the river through the morning air of snow like smoke. My sister was the first female Little Leaguer in our county; my aunt, Kentucky’s first female CPA; my grandmother, the first in the family to graduate from high school. The women in my family fare better than the men. They live longer, destroy less, know better than to hope. I still want a son, the dream of many men.