Chris Offutt - The Same River Twice - A Memoir

“A guy who hangs around the beach, pretending to be a surfer.”

“Like you and art.”

I turned up the stereo. Angry voices bellowed off key. Dane plugged in a bluegrass tape and somebody stomped it after ten seconds. Promising to replace it, I introduced Dane to a woman with a pierced nose. Our only window shattered into the street, venting the acrid haze of cannabis. At midnight a second wave of people arrived with another blast of hysteric energy. Cocaine flowed like twin white train rails.

Periodically I checked on my dismayed brother, who wandered my dump with his feed store cap bobbing above the exuberant crowd. He became grimmer and grimmer. The party peaked at three A.M. and people slowly trickled away, the floor squeaking underfoot from spilt beer. Shadrack was busy with the pierced-nose woman beneath the kitchen table.

I offered Dane my bed. He shook his head, holding the smashed bluegrass tape in his big hands. An empty coke vial crunched below his boot. I waited for him to speak so I could condemn his choice. He knew better, as always. The expression on his face reminded me of our father’s contempt, and I got mad.

“You’re too young to get married,” I said.

“Maybe,” he said. “But you’re too old to live like this.”

I went to my room and closed the door. In the morning we began an argument that lasted the next several years. By the time we reached Kentucky, Dane and I had not spoken for over five hundred miles. He reluctantly agreed that I was right — I should have hitchhiked. After Columbus’s third trip across the sea, he was brought home in manacles and chains. I knew how he felt.

We turned onto the dirt road up our hill, and drove along the ridge to our house. Vines on the south wall clung thick as snakes. My sisters, Jeanie and Sue, rushed across the yard, gave us each a kiss, and entered the house with Dane. Mom stepped from the porch and hugged me, rocking like a jonquil in the wind. She escorted me into the kitchen, where Dad stood beside the stove. Mom stayed in the middle, a demilitarized zone.

Dad and I regarded each other like a brace of roosters. I stiffened my shoulders. Seeing a familiar reaction, he relaxed and offered a beer, the family grease for social interaction. We settled into our former bunkers at opposite corners of the kitchen, separated by the stove. After several years, we had returned to the site of countless vicious conflicts which I’d always lost. During the Civil War, Kentucky was notorious for pitting son against father, brother against brother.

Dad and I gulped our beer through a strange new gauze of respect. I’d stayed away, had never asked for money. His hair was white and he had a belly. He was losing his family to the outside world and there was no replacement. We drank another beer, discussing safe topics that neither of us cared about. He slowly realized that I would not rise to his bait, while I saw him as he was-a man unsure of how to face an adult son. He was stiffly cordial, treating me like an ambassador from an enemy country that had recently signed a treaty. This hill, I realized, belonged irrevocably to Dad. He was Ferdinand ruling Portugal, and he could keep it. I had the New World.

An hour later Mom marshaled the family to the table. Everyone sat in their accustomed seats. For years supper had been nightly and common, with tardiness promptly punished. Now we were disbanding like a riverboat crew confronted by the railroad’s swift competition.

I offered to hold the rings for Dane and he refused.

“Why not?” I said. “Afraid I might pawn them for tux money?”

“Don’t you have it?” he said.

“They’re gray, with a swallowtail,” Jeanie said. “We’re picking them up tomorrow in Lexington. Forty dollars is cheap for a tuxedo.”

“Not cheap enough,” I muttered.

“Some were a hundred dollars,” Sue said. “They were black velvet. But gray goes with pink and that’s what us girls are wearing.”

“You got it or not?” Dane glared at me.

I glanced quickly around the table. Mom stared at her plate. My sisters were smiling at how nice we’d look. Dad chewed the ham bone, its end small and round as a snake’s eye.

“No, Dane,” I said. “I don’t.”

“You could have broke down and got a job.”

“For a tux?”

“For me!” He pushed from the table. “You should see how he lives! Not a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. And he wants to hold my damn rings. One of his girlfriends had a ring in her nose like a root hog.”

“Is that true?” asked Jeanie.

“Yup,” I said. “On the side, though. Not in the middle.”

“Good thing she doesn’t have hay fever,” Dad said.

Jeanie and Sue giggled, while Mom smiled. Dane gripped the chairback so hard the veins on his hands quivered.

“It’s not funny,” he said. “No wonder he doesn’t bring girls home. They do it under the table up there.”

“That wasn’t me, Dane.”

“Your yankee buddy done it.”

“Shad’s like a brother to me.”

“What’s wrong with the one you got?”

“If I weren’t your best man, I’d tell you.”

Dad slammed the ham bone against the table like a gun barrel. The sound echoed in the small room.

“That’ll do, boys.”

Dane left the room, his big feet stomping the pine slat floor. Now that Dad and I enjoyed a cease-fire, I’d attacked my brother. For all my wayward ways, I was still the favored son and Dane was relegated to piloting the Niña, running aground on his own efforts to please the family.

Mom spoke, gentle as rain. “The evening before we got married, your daddy ran his truck through a pasture gate.”

“I’m not a gate.”

“He’s not much of a truck,” Dad said. “Let him be. Lord knows we’ve all let you be.”

The next day everyone but me drove to Lexington for the tuxedos. I went down the hill to my old stone grade school. Every Halloween I’d carried stolen feed corn onto the roof and hauled Dane up by his belt. I would give him half my corn and we’d shower passing cars with the kernels, rattling them like Demeter’s sleet. Other boys from the hill screamed at their brothers like dogs; Dane and I had waited until we were adults to fight. In three months he was going to graduate school on a computer scholarship. Though I’d left first, he no longer needed me. I resented the loss.

I walked home well past dark and ate leftovers alone. The family seemed scared of me, a change from my childhood role. My job then had been to head off trouble by saying something funny, diverting attention. Now I’d become the trouble. I lay on the couch, drank a pint, and went to sleep.

We drove to the church early and changed clothes in a back room. The tux fit a little too tight. My grandmother and Aunt Lou arrived in a flourish of dacron. Cousins appeared, distant uncles and aunts, a hermitic great-uncle with his third wife. My old buddy J.J. roared his pirate hot rod into the lot, windows streaming rock music and marijuana smoke.

The family of the bride was polite and charming, although their Southern Baptist beliefs opposed them to coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, dancing, and me. Ellen’s clan outnumbered us three to one, but we had them buffaloed. The only other male in the wedding party was Dane’s college roommate from Saudi Arabia. Seeing Ahmed, Ellen’s family gasped, fearing that he might just be a black man. Ahmed hung on my arm like a virgin in a strip bar, his accent thick in my ear.

“Chrees. I never been to a Chreestian church before.”

“Hey, everybody,” I bellowed. “This here’s Ahmed! He’s from the Middle East!”

Group tension flitted away like a lynch rope tucked from sight. I left him with J.J. and searched the church for Dane, who was vomiting in the men’s room behind a locked stall. I climbed onto the pristine sink and leaned over the partition.