Chris Offutt - The Same River Twice - A Memoir

I looked into the shadowy world of the shore. “We’re safe here, I guess.”

“Yes,” he said. “This is one of the dark places on earth.”

The somber landscape slid by. Above the engine’s laboring throb came the drone of millions of insects, eating and being eaten, living a life in a single season. Captain Jack stared far ahead, handling the Heron by intuition.

“Watch that log, kid.”

I followed his gaze forward, seeing only the endless gnarled mangroves and occasional knees of cypress. The boat’s wake spread behind us like a turkey’s tail fan. I expected to hear the sound of a log striking the bow, thumping the length of the boat and ruining the propeller.

“Port side,” he said.

Barely visible in the murky water, a log floated away from us, its knobby surface blending with the swamp. It bumped against a strip of muddy shore and continued to rise. Water drained away as a tapered snout climbed the bank, followed by two stubby legs, a long armored body, two more legs, and a scaled tail that dragged the mud. The alligator began walking parallel to the boat, head high as if proud. I felt both envy and awe. Three hundred million years had passed in the forty seconds I watched it move from water to land.

“Small,” Captain Jack said. “Only runs to a six-purser.”

We reached Coot Bay, a lagoon soaked in light where butterflies flitted among the branches. Our passage out seemed less foreboding. As we moved into the final turn that opened to the Gulf, an eagle attacked an osprey in the sky. The osprey dropped the fish it was carrying and the eagle snatched it in midair. Captain Jack called the eagle “an aerial rat.”

For the next three weeks we traveled into the swamp twice a day. There was a sunset voyage into the Florida Bay, watching the sun fall behind the Gulf, staining the long strips of cloud pink and scarlet. Occasionally dolphins cavorted beside us, blowing funnels of water into the air. The plaintive cry of gulls faded into the dusk.

I stood amidships with binoculars and a portable PA system, identifying birds, trees, the occasional manatee and alligator. My most enthusiastic lecture concerned hurricanes. They arrived an average of every seven years, and the last one of any real force had been in 1926. The Everglades was now severely congested, thick and stagnant. A hurricane acted as a giant cleaning machine, ridding the swamp of overgrowth, depositing new seeds and soil, blowing tropical birds from island to mainland. Nature required hurricanes. They were as necessary and valuable as forest fires in the Northwest.

The ranger gave me a pad of graph paper for mapping the movement of storms. A station in Key West announced weather updates every hour, and Captain Jack lent me a radio. Of three tropical depressions, only one developed into a storm, but it petered out while crossing the Atlantic.

When a tour was canceled due to weather, Captain Jack and I talked.* During forty years in the Coast Guard, he had killed three men, only one of whom he regretted. Smuggling was the chief crime. I asked if he knew Spanish and he claimed enough to communicate at sea.

“Let’s hear it,” I said.

“Cómo se llama? De dónde es? Todo es una mentira. Salga de la barca.”

“What’s that mean?”

“What’s your name? Where are you from? It’s all a lie. Get out of the boat.”

“What else?”

“Nothing, That’s all I ever needed.”

The majority of our passengers were European tourists making their first American stop. The French complained that our bread was too soft, the British fretted about malaria, and the Germans hated our beer. One day thirty French people crowded our boat. We moved into the bay and I spotted a log floating along the bank. Following Captain Jack’s bilingual example, I spouted my best French: “A droit, a droit! Alligator a droit!”

The entire gang reacted as if I’d announced the new Beaujolais was of a wonderful grape. They forced their way to the rail, taking pictures and grunting in polite tones. The boat tilted to starboard. A four-year-old boy leaned over the water, his body between the rails. Slowly his feet rose into the air and I watched his little legs slide overboard. Swift as thought, I vaulted the iron rail and hit the nasty water, my feet brushing the bottom. I grabbed the kid by the hair. Something struck my head and I lost him. Floating beside me lay the life preserver attached to a line. The boy was treading water easily, a better swimmer than his rescuer. I grabbed the life ring and beckoned to the kid, who stuck out his tongue and made a face. I splashed water in his eyes and took him by the throat.

Four men pulled the rope back to the boat. Captain Jack stood with one hand on the tiller and the other holding a pistol that I didn’t know he carried. My head banged the hull. I pushed the kid up and he kicked me in the face. By the time I was hauled into the boat, my shirt was stained from a nosebleed. The boy was in his mother’s arms.

Captain Jack maneuvered the Heron to the dock, where I tethered us to the continent. I thought about the boy who’d fallen off his horse in New York, and wondered if rescuing this kid had squared me with the cosmos. As the passengers disembarked, each one kissed me repeatedly on the cheeks. Captain Jack looked very sad.

“What were you going to do?” I said. “Shoot me if I didn’t save him?”

“No,” he said. “For sharks.”

“What?”

“They get trapped in here when the tide goes out. They can’t get past the reef. You jumped in shark water, kid. Damn foolish thing to do.”

I tried to sit and missed the bench.

“Get up, kid,” he said. “You’re all right. My wife will be glad for supper company.”

I changed clothes and he drove us through the swamp to Homestead. Occasionally he glanced at me and shook his head. Mrs. Jack was very large and treated me as though I were a son home from college. She served fish stew loaded with vegetables, my first real meal in months. Captain Jack nodded as she talked of her day — the perpetually failing garden, a bridge game partnered with a woman she didn’t like, the price of lettuce. There seemed to exist between them a pact regarding communication, perhaps the result of her life spent wondering if he’d come home alive. I complimented the food and asked what it was.

“Shark,” she said. “The captain’s favorite.”

He laughed silently, then took me to a screened-in back porch, where he smoked a pipe. He turned the bowl downside up, a habit from the sea. We didn’t talk although I sensed he wanted to. Being inland forced a shift between us, a minor tectonic slip we couldn’t bridge. At ten o’clock he said it was time for bed.

He showed me to a room with a life-size poster of John Wayne on the wall. A shelf held a row of model cars and a dusty baseball glove. Propped on a desk was a framed photograph of a young face, stoic in a Marine dress uniform. Beside it lay a small box. Captain Jack nodded to the photograph.

“My boy died saving three men. Damn foolish thing to do.”

He opened the box, which contained a Bronze Star on a faded ribbon. “Fat lot of good it did him,” he muttered. “Or his mother.” He closed the box, replaced it in the exact spot on the desk, and stepped into the darkness of the hall. “Damn foolish,” he said again.

I turned off the light and stood beside the bed for a long time. I undressed, rolled my pants into a ball, slipped them into my shirt for a pillow, and slept on the floor.

The next day the Haitian was gone from the park. He’d been arrested for possession while I’d been at the captain’s house, and the scuttlebutt was simple — I had snitched. No one joined me at meals. If I sat with others, they moved. Even Bucky became more formal, slightly distant, as if giving me plenty of lead rope. Captain Jack and I continued to work well together aboard the Heron, but talked less. He was gruff and impatient. His son had come between us in a way I never understood. Captain Jack seemed to resent my knowledge of him, the way a man feels anger toward a friend who saved his life.