Colson Whitehead - John Henry Days

There’s a car behind him, the first car since he started walking, and he fights the vision his paranoia prepares for him: the truck jags right just as it reaches him, sends his body flying into the river and his body washes up weeks later on some littoral strip downriver, wherever this river ends up once it splashes past these mountains. No one around to witness this anonymous violence and no one to identify his body, the fish have eaten his identification (pollution has given them a taste for crisp plastic and magnetic strips). But then he remembers his invincibility, and this morning’s distaste for his customary scenarios. Exhale your city self into this cool country air, this place can absorb all of you and more. It isn’t a truck, he sees as it rounds the turn, but a Chevy Nova of a perky green shade, with hubcaps of spinning rust. The driver, a middle-aged brunette who sucks a cigarette and squints through smoke as they pass; in the passenger seat a little girl with a round moon face stares at J., turning in her seat to watch him recede as they speed on to town. And perhaps her oddly sharp gaze disturbs him for a moment, but then they are gone, he is alone again in the paralyzed landscape. See, nothing to worry about here.

Walk down the road until you get to the bridge, take a left, the woman at the front desk told him, it’s about two and a half miles. He calculated that to be a forty-five minute walk, and here it is, not so bad at all even though it is something that wouldn’t normally occur to him. A receiptless span of time. What else had the stamp collector ejected from his gut last night. To make him feel like this. He makes a list of pertinent phenomena. The choking thing had sobered him up immediately, leeching booze from him as desperately as his blood wrenched oxygen from blue depleted blood. He’d forsaken the drinking session in Tiny’s room, and the ginger ale rehydrated him after a couple days of serious junketeering and its attendant effects. Although he hadn’t slept that long, he’d slept on his own schedule and not publicity’s. The facilities at the Motor Lodge, the lack of them, had forced him to leave his room for food. And finally, he is getting some air. Serious routine-breaking in the last twelve hours on all fronts. Maybe it is more than that. Thinking back, he hasn’t felt this clear in months. (Such is the bad posture of his nights, slouching always into dipso inclinations.) Grateful body. Have to give the stamp collector a proper thanks at some point.

J. comes to a spot where the shoulder widens and he spies an opening in the trees and gossiping brush that slides down to the river. People park here and go fishing, he figures, old grandpa teaching little Jimmy about bait and life. Or teenagers smoking joints and throwing beer cans into the river and making out: he sees some sun-bleached cigarette butts and what appear to be a large pair of jockey shorts at the edge of the parking area. A lark: the trail down to the river is steep and he makes his way down to the bank slowly, prodding upslope dirt to its premature retirement on the bank, trading steady poplar branch for steadying hemlock trunk until he makes it the thirty slanted yards to the semicircle stretch of mud.

Except for the railroad tracks across the river he can’t see any sign of civilization. And the silver loop of an old can’s pull-top in the sand, but nothing else. Out of the sunlight and in the shade of the trees crouched around the bank, J. feels his body cool and he slips into an even deeper silence, even though the brown river is louder than the empty road. Time out of the world. A little downstream the water blows over a sill of rocks that sends white curtains twisting and twirling. For an instant J. sees himself clinging to one of those rocks, but he can’t figure out if that momentary image is a scene of final hard-won safety or just a reprieve before the battle for the shore. He has half a mind to sit but decides instead to make an oath, some stentorian declaration of himself and purposes. Isn’t that what you do in places like this, among nature, out of the hurly-burly, no one to hear but those who won’t tattle: make an oath. Hurl one. Same thing as laying a road or nailing railroad tracks into frigid dirt, that’s making an oath too, saying I am. And if it was good enough for his hosts this weekend, it is good enough for him, he figures. He is an American, fuck it, he has his Social Security card in his pocket at that very moment.

He can’t think of anything. He gives it a full five minutes and decides to take a piss instead.

He takes one last look and clambers up the dirt. He approaches town and whistles without recognition the tune he heard at dinner the night before.

It does not take Guy Johnson long to realize that he is the bug. From beneath the creature’s russet carapace erupt segmented legs bristling with tiny spurs. Soft antennae droop from its head in a dejected parabola half as long as its body. The bug probably discovered the lemon sour with its antennae, but that is conjecture for entomology is not Guy’s field. At the university entomology is housed on the other side of campus from the humanities and he never has occasion to visit there. Guy has been watching the bug for a while now. Reconstructing likely narratives is Guy’s enterprise these days, and it extends even to his rest break, as he sits on the hard mattress staring at the floor. The bug sniffed around the room until it arrived at its present location a few feet from Guy’s bed, straddling a gritty slit between two floorboards; its movements before he first noticed it are unknowable. Nibbling and sniffing at the candy he dropped a few minutes before, the bug discovers what he discovered, that the enticing discovery is in actuality a trick, and the tongue will curdle on it. Yet it feasts.

He wonders if the proper word is mandible, not tongue. If one jumps to conclusions, one will corrupt the research. One wrong step and one is investigating an entirely incorrect avenue. He unlaces his shoe, fingers clenched around it in a traditional insect-squashing manner and he places it slowly, not without a touch of sadism, above the inquisitive creature. He stays his hand, watching. He waits for the insect to tire or grow sickened of its find. The lemon sour is too big, there is no way in God’s green earth that the insect can devour it all. But it does not tire. It nibbles, making progress imperceptible to the eye, and Guy replaces the shoe on his foot. He realizes he is the bug. They do what they must.

When he departed this morning, his papers were spread across the room according to the manner in which he had organized his vast materials, which is to say not organized at all but entirely submissive to the disorder of this project. Transcribed versions of the ballad crouched beneath correspondence received from his informants, notes tossed off in an elusive moment of inspiration secreted themselves in a sheaf of entirely unrelated sections. Amber scraps bickered in piles, contradicting each other in a crumbling din; one half of an interview skulked in one pile while the other half brooded in a pile across the room. He rode herd over crafty fugitives. If he were to die tomorrow, no one would be equipped to make sense of his investigation. He did not have a choice but to let his research roam as it pleased. If all his accumulations were organized properly in well-marked folders, in coherent groups, he would be lying, declaring that he had bested this dragon. He has not. He cannot make sense of any of it. He can savor one or two triumphs, of course. Guy has disentangled the John Henry tale from the John Hardy tale and traced their commingling in certain ballad variants. He has eliminated the false leads generated by regional versions, disentangled the Alabama State Southern and Norfolk & Western from the Chesapeake & Ohio. All those routes in a gnarl. Still he has refused to organize his material to reflect this. He is transfixed and paralyzed by the confusion, and when he returned from this morning’s interviews and saw that in addition to making his bed and sweeping the floor Mrs. Thompson had erected one looming and impenetrable stack from his strewn papers, his initial flush of anger eased into gratitude. She had reminded him that he had still not found his way into the mountain.